30 finances, I would call up the US subsidiary of the global bank that owned the bank that had bought the company I worked for that was now the administrator of my pension fund. I tried to get signed up on their online system. The bank would deny that I was in the pension fund. It insisted that it had no obligation to provide me with a pension fund. I got frustrated, so I had my lawyer call. Again, they denied that I was in the plan. They refused to recognize my documentation. At the same time, I had a partner who persuad- ed me that I should apply for social security early because, if you look at what I could do in terms of investment with my existing savings, he calculated I would be better off taking social security early. And he argued, the system was not trustworthy – if I waited they could change the rules on me. In the process I received a doc- ument from Social Security that authenticated and confirmed that the pension fund had sent a confirmation to the Department of Labor that I was in the pension fund and was owed a monthly benefit at a certain level. I now had an official government document that certified the pension fund itself had reported to the federal govern- ment my being a beneficiary. So I called the bank again, and lo and behold, it still insisted that I wasn’t in the pension fund. So I sent them a copy of the document. About three weeks later I received a call from a person from the bank who was clearly too senior to be doing customer service – even for a situation like this. I suspect, but I cannot prove, that what had happened was that, for political reasons, someone made sure that my name was out of the database, and after investigation they discovered, “We need to put her back in.” It could have been my old Dillon Read partners trying to make sure that I could not get my pension fund. However, it could simply be the pension fund trying to wiggle out of as many obligations as possible. Whatever the reason, I got the world’s most charming senior executive handling my account. I proceeded for the next month or two to get online and my pension fund began its regular payments in the course of the next year. No matter how bad you know corruption and fraud are, it always shocks when it happens to you. It’s like being dropped from a seesaw to have it touch you in this manner. I believe that there was an intentional effort to cheat me out of my pension fund. You determine what you think happened and why. Frankly, if it hadn’t been for the honest civil service in the US government, I would have been out of a significant flow of income for the rest of my life. It’s not the first time that US civil service has pulled my chestnuts out of the fire. So between what happened with my 401(k) and my Wall Street pension fund, I don’t have much confidence in the pension system. I’m far from a random sample. We have a financial system in which the governance and the enforcement are sufficiently corrupt that it’s difficult to have con- fidence in the integrity of the system. This is why it is important that you investigate your unique situation and assess integrity at the individual fund and institution level. My Home One of the primary sources of retirement savings is capital gains on the family home, farm, land and real estate. I had a very beautiful small mansion in Wash- ington. In the process of the litigation, I experi- enced incredible jealousy and anger coming from the people attacking me about how beautiful my home was. Indeed, when I was Assistant Secretary of Housing, the Secretary of Housing informed me that he would never accept an invi- tation to attend an event at my previous home (a Washington brownstone), saying “your home is bigger than my home, I would find it castrating.” I proceeded to sell my home and about every possession in it – all my antiques, most of my art collection, everything, including selling family antiques back to relatives – to finance the make work and deal with the smear campaigns, litiga- II. THE STATE OF OUR PENSION FUNDS “One of the primary sources of retirement savings is capital gains on the family home, farm, land and real estate.”