Mr. Rollover, Ira Rollover

Although my dream in life is to be a writer and an entertainment host, I do have to pay the bills; therefore I need a stable income. Currently, I am working at an investment advisory firm where I am very comfortable with retirement plans, profit sharing plans and trusts, but that wasn’t the case in 2004 when I worked at an insurance firm downtown. After graduating from Sacred Heart University with a degree in Media Studies, I got my first real job in Los Angeles at Chiat Day, an advertising agency, where we were basically paid in pennies and peanuts. After a year at the agency, I was in serious credit card debt, had a running tab with my parents and was sick of eating Ramen noodles, so I started looking for a higher paying job- doing anything. Thanks to a former co-worker at Chiat, I was hired as an administrative assistant at an insurance agency where I went from making $20,000 per year to $34,500. I was rich, bitch- I felt like Oprah Winfrey!

Even though I was shown what to do every day at my new job and was comfortable answering the phones and assisting the salesmen, I was so unfamiliar with all these terms being thrown around that I felt like the only English speaking person in an office that only spoke Mandarin. I had no financial background and the only thing I knew about insurance was how much a paid every month for my car. One of my weekly duties was to file all client statements and correspondence in the file cabinet next to my desk, sorted by the client’s last name. I kept seeing these statements with the name ‘Ira Rollover’ at the top, and although I thought ‘Rollover’ was a strange last name, I figured that he was just an old, rich Jewish man. The ‘R’ folder kept growing thicker and thicker until months later when I realized that an IRA Rollover was a retirement plan and not an old, wealthy guy from Beverly Hills.

Luckily no one but me went into those file cabinets and once I made the realization, I came in extra early one morning to re-file all the ‘Rollovers’ to their proper folders, saving me a ton of embarrassment. I still laugh every time I hear IRA Rollover and thank God no one at my old job ever knew of my little mishap…until now!