What I mean by this blog title is that Trust Funds are not a financial catch-all. They cannot really be trusted until the money is actually in your hands.
Disney Child Star lost millions
The Tax Man can giveth or taketh away.
My favorite young actress from the 60’s is none other than Haley Mills. Her turn as twins in the 1961 movie Parent Trap rocketed her to the top spot of most popular actresses of the 1960’s.
The Disney legend became a household name after appearing in projects such as Tiger Bay (1959), The Parent Trap (1961), and That Darn Cat! (1965).
I also really liked The Moon-Spinners (1964).
My favorite movie of hers was Summer Magic (1963). It’s synopsis reads:
When a close-knit Boston family loses their fortune, they find a wealth of secrets, young love, and more in Beulah, Maine. It’s Nancy (Mills), the eldest of three children, who finds the family’s new home—along with a jolly postmaster, a pretentious cousin, and a mysterious absentee landlord.
Looking back over this movies premise, come to think of it, was this story foretelling her future. Like the owl in that Tootsie Roll commercial, the world may never know…well, until she wrote that memoir that is.
Disney darling Hayley Mills revealed she lost millions of dollars due to financial advice from her father’s financial advisor, Stanley Passmore.
Hayley Mills lost the vast majority of her childhood Disney fortune to a massive 91% British tax rate and poor trust fund planning orchestrated by her father’s financial manager.
This unfortunate turn of events was detailed in her memoir.
The critical factors behind the loss include:
- Improper Trust Structure: Her earnings from massive hits like Pollyanna and The Parent Trap were placed into a trust, but the business manager failed to set up the trust correctly to protect her from extreme tax brackets.
- Crippling Taxes: When she turned 21 and gained access to the fund, British “supertaxes” and surtaxes were hovering around 90%. Consequently, nearly the entirety of her reported $10 million+ earnings were wiped out by the government.
- Failed Legal Appeals: While she briefly won an appeal in the 1970s when a judge ruled it was unfair to tax her earnings this way, the House of Lords overturned the decision, finalizing the financial blow.
As detailed in her memoir Forever Young, Mills never actually got to hold or enjoy the bulk of her early success.
Hayley Mills’ exact salary per individual movie was never widely publicized, but her six-film contract with Disney reportedly accumulated an estimated $17 million (equivalent to over $21 million today) in a trust fund.
Unfortunately, because her early British earnings and Disney wages were placed into a trust fund incorrectly managed by her father’s attorney, almost all of it was lost. The specific details regarding the loss of her childhood acting wages include:
The Tax Man: Mills ultimately lost the vast majority of her multi-million dollar Disney fortune due to a brutal 90% British “super-tax” rate in effect at the time for high-earning minors.
Failed Appeals: Although she fought the British government for years and briefly won a 1973 ruling to keep her money, the House of Lords ultimately appealed and ruled against her in 1975, leaving her trust fund virtually empty.
Memoir Reveal: Mills discussed the heartbreak of never actually seeing her Disney wealth, likening it to a vanished dream.
Literally four years after making Summer Magic in 1963, by 1967, she lost pretty much her entire fortune that was built after a decade of hard work.
It broke my heart to hear her story. She worked so hard to lose so much. She had truly earned her financial freedom. Alas, it was not meant to be.
Her story, like Shirley Temple’s, was another fiscal cautionary tale. You must become financially literate or bad things can happen.
The best gift I feel I can give myself when it comes to money is the gift of financial literacy.
I voraciously read dozens of books on personal finance and business. I may not have went to an Ivy League School or gotten a PHD, but I made sure to give myself a self-taught education in finance. Some of the books I read were even written by people who went to Harvard, Yale, Princeton or Columbia.
I made sure to get an Ivy League education in financial literacy.
By managing my own finances, I can avoid being overcharged and underpaid.
Reading about money taught me that you can either be rich or look rich, but you can’t be both.
For every 8-hor day, I try to invest at least 1-hour of what I earn.
Therefore, if you earn $100,000, then the goal would be to invest between 10 to 20 percent.
The current 401k and Roth IRA limits are $24,500 ad $7,500, respectively.
Selling a property also helped me boost my savings. Real estate can help you build a fortune.
After reading about Haley Mills and other actresses, athletes and musicians, I truly believe that there should be a class for celebrities called Finance 101.
Once I hit $250,000 in investments, I knew I could teach others.
Let’s not wait one more second to learn about money. It’s not only a retail apocalypse out there, but a financial knowledge desert and job apocalypse. Meta and Google and numerous other companies are laying off tens of thousands of workers. Saving and investing are ways to protect yourself from the pink slip apocalypse.
Your girl, Greenbacks Magnet, is here for you.
Just call me or tweet me. I am here for you anytime. A mere tweet away.
I’m just like Buffy says…👇
About the author
Miriam started Greenbacks Magnet in 2016 to keep a scorecard of her goal of $1M in investable assets. Armed with a Master in Management (MiM) and a calculator, she teaches readers how to achieve financial independence while also helping them learn how to smell the roses along the way. The palpable response she got from sharing her personal finance goal in a public speaking course at Georgetown University encouraged her to share her story and teach finance on her website. She invests in AI companies as artificial intelligence is the new iPhone of the moment as she likes to invest in companies that are disruptive.