'Mad Men' and Your Money

• By KELLY GREENE

 

AMC/Everett Collection

Executives at the fictional Sterling Cooper agency should put any pre-IPO stock into trusts for their kids.

There is more to the television hit "Mad Men," which wraps up its sixth season Sunday night, than 1960s period detail and arch references to Heinz ketchup ads.
The show—which chronicles the saga of the fictional New York advertising firm Sterling Cooper & Partners and its executives, staff and their families—averages 2.5 million viewers each week, with nearly half of its viewers between the ages of 25 and 54 reporting household income of at least $100,000 a year, according to AMC, the show's network.
"Mad Men" also offers a treasure trove of financial lessons for families in that demographic group.
This season has explored the drug culture, riots, Nixon campaign and other events roiling the world in the late 1960s through the prism of Madison Avenue—and also the increasing complexity of the lives of a handful of women staking out their independence, both at work and in their personal lives.
The result: The characters' money choices are getting messier and their need to plan ahead more important. While the show itself doesn't dwell on financial details, a number of financial planners and lawyers devoted to "Mad Men" have given the potential mistakes of its female characters a great deal of thought and find themselves occasionally screaming advice at their screens.
Among them are the four women who make up Sandy Cove Advisors in Hingham, Mass., who often gather on Mondays to dissect the previous night's show and the characters' financial foibles.
"It's the overarching theme—emotions getting in the way of sound financial decisions for women," says Deirdre Prescott, the firm's president. "We see it a lot. The key is to give people the tools to make sound financial decisions without having them clouded by what's happening in their lives."
Here are some modern ways to tackle the personal-finance challenges facing the women, and their male counterparts, of "Mad Men":
• Make it big before marriage? Consider a prenuptial agreement.
Peggy Olson, the drama's protofeminist heroine, has done such a stellar job of maneuvering from secretary to chief copywriter at Sterling Cooper that she can buy an Upper East Side apartment with what real-estate agents refer to as a "partial river view."
But when her boyfriend starts talking about raising a family in a fixer-upper on the then-crime-ridden Upper West Side, she is quickly swayed to buy there instead.
For some lawyer fans of the show, Ms. Olson's switching gears so readily for a man underscores the need for women in her shoes preparing to marry to negotiate a prenuptial agreement.
Today, many financial planners and lawyers recommend prenuptial agreements, and even postnuptial agreements, for financially successful women. But such legal protections aren't ironclad. A New York court decision in February made it easier to challenge such documents. The New York Supreme Court's Appellate Division affirmed two lower-court decisions, ruling that a real-estate investor fraudulently induced his fiancée to sign a prenup four days before they married.
There are ways to make a prenup tougher to challenge. You should give your betrothed plenty of notice—at least a month or two—before the wedding that you want him or her to sign such an agreement. Some lawyers advise putting any possible objection into writing, including clauses that say that there aren't any oral agreements on the side.
Finally, the law says any waiver of property rights or alimony payments before the wedding has to be reached in good conscience and without unfair pressure and not be completely lopsided, says Jeffrey Landers, a certified divorce financial analyst and president of Bedrock Divorce Advisors in New York.
• When your firm is about to go public, get your estate plan in order.
Joan Harris, who is juggling life as a partner in the firm with being the divorced mother of a young son, should be looking for ways to pass along any share in the firm to him now in case it revives an attempt to go public, planners say.
Ms. Harris is trying to get ahead. In an earlier season of the show, she slept with an executive at Jaguar in exchange for a 5% interest in Sterling Cooper, and more recently cut out a co-worker from a meeting in order to land Avon Products as AVP -2.26% a client.
In her time, she was a pioneer, but she would be in good company among today's working mothers: A record 40% of all households with children under age 18 have mothers who are the sole, or primary, breadwinner, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of U.S. Census data. The share was just 11% in 1960.
Among these breadwinner moms, 63%, or 8.6 million, are single mothers like Ms. Harris. The other 37%, or 5.1 million, are married and have a higher income than their husbands.
As Ms. Harris's pay increases, she should start putting what she can into savings for her son. The contemporary vehicles that would make sense include starting with a 529 college-savings plan, which could earn her some state and federal tax benefits. Then she should consider a trust, possibly funded with a chunk of her holdings in the firm, says Linda Hirschson, a shareholder in law firm Greenberg Traurig in New York. Assuming Ms. Harris's partnership increases in value, putting whatever she can into a trust now could limit gift or estate taxes down the road.
In the early part of the season, the firm's partners tried to go public. But they pull the plug on an initial public offering after another partner, Don Draper—the show's leading character—unaware of the IPO plan, orchestrates a merger with a rival firm to land Chevrolet as a client.
Assuming the firm might attempt another IPO down the road, Ms. Harris could put some of her hard-to-sell stock into a trust for her son now, at a presumably lower pre-IPO value, without running afoul of the federal gift-tax exclusion, currently $14,000 a year, plus a lifetime limit of $5.25 million.
For that matter, Ms. Hirschson says, "all these people have kids, so they could put their stock into dynasty trusts," a type of trust used by the wealthy to shelter assets from estate taxes and generation-skipping transfer taxes, perhaps for hundreds of years. "The price of the shares is definitely low, so they could pass some of the wealth on to their kids."
It could be hard to move a partnership interest in a service company into a trust because such assets are tough to appraise, and smaller firms sometimes simply make cash distributions each year, cautions Elyse Kirschner, a partner at law firm McDermott Will & Emery in New York. Still, "taking away all the complications, you should do the planning before the value increases," she says.
• If you hire a caregiver for your mom, keep an eye on her bank account.
Pete Campbell, Sterling Cooper's head of accounts, is at a loss as to how to care for his mother, Dorothy, who is developing dementia. Hiring an attendant referred by a colleague at first seems to be the perfect fix. But Pete becomes increasingly flustered by his mother's allusions to an affair with the aide, Manolo—his last name isn't given—and he finally fires the aide outright.
Still, his mother tells her son that he can't stop her from continuing to see Manolo socially.
If Mr. Campbell isn't already worried that his mother's aide might be trying to gain control over at least a portion of her finances, he should be, advocates for family caregivers say.
Increasing numbers of adult children these days are dealing with the strain of arranging appropriate care for their parents without missing a beat on the job. Forty-two percent of U.S. workers have provided care for a relative or friend in the past five years, and 49% expect to do so in the next five years, according to an October report by AARP, the membership group for older Americans. They, too, run into thorny issues of trust while trying to keep their loved ones safe.
Financial exploitation costs older adults an estimated $2.9 billion a year in the U.S., often due to fraud or outright theft by paid caregivers and family members, or through investment fraud, according to MetLife MET -0.18% . The typical victim, like Dorothy Campbell, is a frail white woman between the ages of 70 and 89 who is cognitively impaired, trusting and often lonely or isolated.
The Eldercare Locator, an online directory (eldercare.gov) and call center (800-677-1116) supported by the federal government, advises families to spend some time together to talk and learn about ways to prevent financial exploitation.
The website has a free consumer guide, "Protect Your Pocketbook: Tips to Avoid Financial Exploitation." Signs to look out for include inconsistent financial activity, confusion about recent financial arrangements, changes to key documents or an older adult's feeling uneasy about someone seeking control of their finances.
• When life gets complicated, protect your assets.
This season also features a classic case of a deadbeat son-in-law. Trudy Campbell, who is married to Pete, finally tires of her husband's philandering and banishes him to the Manhattan apartment she had urged him to get, secretly in the hope that he would keep his extramarital activities far from the Connecticut home where they are raising their young daughter, Tammy.
At this point, Ms. Campbell's parents should put any assets they want to go to her and Tammy into a trust.
"The main point is to make sure Pete doesn't get control of her money," Ms. Hirschson says.
There also is an international couple, a situation that calls for more sophisticated financial planning: Megan Draper, Don's second wife, is Canadian. She's breaking out as a soap-opera actress, but he still is presumably the big breadwinner.
Assuming she isn't a U.S. citizen and that they stay married until his death—despite his own philandering—he would have to create what is called a qualified domestic trust to take advantage of the marital estate-tax deduction, Ms. Hirschson says
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