to a knowledgeable person,” Fred says.
“I have great confidence in his advice—
and in the results of his advice.”
Between Fred’s frugal approach to
spending, no doubt a result of being a
child of the Depression, and heeding
Mueller’s advice, Fred has accumulated a
$600,000 nest egg, although he says he
never made more than $38,000 a year.
Mueller has carefully orchestrated where
Fred’s money was put to multiply, safe
from undue taxation. Twice he has had
Fred remove his money from the stock
market for a period of time—in 2000,
and again a year and a half ago. Now
Fred’s money is distributed into “many
piles”— 15 fixed-interest annuities.
Despite the bad rap that the combina-
tion of “seniors and annuities” gets
in the media, Fred says that Mueller
put him “at ease” with annuities.
Fred is representative of Mu-
eller”s clients. Mueller didn’t
leave any of his 3,000-plus
clients in the stock market
when he saw the financial
cataclysm looming on the
horizon well over a year
ago. “The way I explain it
to my clients is like this:
“Would you prefer me to
make a big mistake or a
little mistake? The big
mistake is that I guess
wrong, leave you in the
market, and you lose
20, 30 or 40 percent of
your money. The little
mistake is that I guess wrong, put you
in a fixed-interest investment, and you
only make 5 percent. Which would
you prefer?’”
A working-class millionaire
Mueller’s strategy of choosing fixed-interest annuities for his older clients
becomes even clearer when we visit
Elaine. We park in front of her home
in a working-class neighborhood.
She’s there to greet us even before
we reach the door. Once inside, we
are ushered through a tiny living
room. We sit at the Formica kitchen
table and chat. Mueller is here to talk
to Elaine, 82, who is a widow of 16
years, about an annuity he feels is
underperforming; it’s time to look
for another that will give her a better
return. Elaine brings out the binders Mueller has given her with all her
paperwork. It represents how, over
the last nine years, Mueller has grown
her original $500,000, which she and
her husband accumulated from his
factory job and her part-time work,
into an amount within arm’s reach of
$1 million.
Elaine smiles when she uses
the word millionaire. Dressed in a
sweatshirt decorated with hearts for
Valentine’s Day, her persona belies
the wealth that she could tap if she
wished. But she doesn’t. “I have all I
need,” says Elaine, who lives off her
Social Security funds and a small pension check, which total about $1,600
a month. The lump sum of money will
one day go to her children, but in the
meantime, it’s there to give her peace
of mind. She knows that she never
has to worry about how she would pay
for nursing-home care, for example, if
the need should arise.
Mueller also points out that he
didn’t take “the lazy way and put all
her money into one annuity.” With
the sum divided among 16 annuities,
he is, at any point, able to tap into a
single annuity to get money for Elaine,
should she ever need it, while greatly
minimizing the tax burden, something
that a single annuity wouldn’t allow
him to do.
Elaine met Mueller when a neighbor,
who is also a client, raved to Elaine’s
daughter about the work Mueller did for
him. Elaine agreed to meet with Mueller,
but it was an “initial meeting by committee”: Elaine had her two daughters, two
sons-in-law and two grandsons there
with her—just to make sure. Not only
did Mueller win Elaine as a client, he
now works with Elaine’s two daughters
and their families as well. This is how he
grows his business. “My clients take care
of me. They tell others about the good
job I’m doing—and I’m always sure to
include the children in the process from
the very beginning,” he says. “The way I
look at it is: Their money is my money,
and I treat it that way. It’s important that
they know it and I know it. … I keep
them safe by keeping their money safe.”
Elaine certainly understands that. As
thousands, perhaps millions, across the
country are nursing financial wounds
