On Dec. 10, Maureen Ebel believed she had $7.3 million in her financial portfolio, and was looking forward to spending the winter at her Florida home.
A week later, she was forced to begin working as a maid after learning that nearly all of her nest egg had disappeared in the massive Ponzi scheme run by Bernard Madoff.
“If there’s a nickel on the street, I’m picking it up,” the 60-year-old, widowed Ebel told the Philadelphia Inquirer. “This is my fate.”
PAGE SIX: Larry King Joins Madoff Loser List
The fate of the West Goshen Township, Pa., resident now includes having to put her West Palm Beach, Fla., condo and her Lexus SUV up for sale. She plans on taking in a boarder and going back to work full-time.
She’s had to sell off a pingpong table, a painting and some jewelry for a total of just $3,000, and returned a recently purchased $1,300 television to Costco, the Inquirer reported. Other returns -a porch furniture set, a club membership and earrings – took another $11,600 off of her American Express bill.
Ebel is one of many people – perhaps thousands – who lost the vast bulk of their life savings in Madoff’s purported $50 billion fraud, which came to light Dec. 11 when he was arrested by the FBI.
She got the bad news in a telephone call from her Uncle Leonard, 80, who had convinced her to invest $4.5 million with Madoff’s firm after her husband died in 2000. Except for a $50,000 bond – which she cashed in last month – that was all of her money.
“At the time, when [Uncle Leonard] got me into Madoff, he had been a Madoff investor for 25 years, and now he’s a Madoff investor and broke after 30 years,” Ebel said.
“I was married, had a fabulous marriage to a man I loved and worshiped, a physician. We traveled. We had a very fine life. And he’s dead. He died, and every penny I had in the world has been stolen.”
A former nurse, Ebel plans to apply for re-certification so she can got back to work in her former profession.
But she’s taken a job as a maid and caretaker for the elderly mother of a friend, including ironing and vacuuming.
“The first day, I went home and cried,” Ebel told the Inquirer.
Her return to work also ended a new relationship.
“I wasn’t the person I was. I got up and went to work every day,” she told the newspaper. “I was working six days a week, and I’m tired when I get home.”
Ebel, not surprisingly, is furious at Madoff, who has been allowed to remain free on $10 million bail, confined to his $7 million Manhattan penthouse awaiting trial.
“You can’t print it,” she told a reporter who asked what she would do to Madoff if she ever found herself alone with him.
She’s being forced to adjust her fiscal outlook.
During a recent trip to a supermarket, Ebel, for the first time, checked the prices of cartons of cream before finding a two-for-one sale.
Then, she told the Inquirer, she started “rooting through the canned goods” on sale.
“What do I eat? Corn, I’ll eat that,” she said. “String beans, I’ll eat that. Two for one. This is what it is after having an income of $400,000 a year.”