Engaged in lives of rich and poor
Erdmann has quicksilver gestures, but I visualize him as a man coolly balancing wealth in one hand and poverty in the other.
Weather conditions on Thanksgiving morning 1992 were just not cooperating with Jeff Erdmann’s plans to both propose to and punk his future wife. Plummeting temperatures and rain contributed to “a real snotty Thanksgiving.”
Nevertheless, he showed Barbara the faux note on his Norwalk counter demanding he move his boat from a mooring “or we’re going to have to move it for you.”
He gave her some of his father’s rain gear and they started rowing a wooden boat. The joke was on him. It hadn’t been on the water in a spell and started sinking.
“So I quickly proposed and we rowed back and I said ‘Let’s do something good before we see the family.’ ”
It’s a memorable proposal, but his next decision was also an important bookmark in Erdmann’s life. He suggested they check out the nearby Norwalk soup kitchen, which had caught his eye.
A few years ago he returned to the scene of that Thanksgiving morning, noticed the agency was flailing and started volunteering. He is now chairman of the board of trustees for Open Door Shelter.
The proposal is one of three personal anecdotes spanning 39 years that Erdmann shares over our 45-minute interview. He’s a natural, affable conversationalist, which suits him well given his engagement with neighbors at both ends of the widest wealth gap in the nation.
As managing director of the Merrill Erdmann Group, he has a four-year streak as Forbes’ topranked wealth adviser in the nation, along with a mirror distinction from Barron’s. His team in Greenwich manages about $10.2 billion (give or take a few billion) for some 170 families.
That means advising clients on whether they can afford a private plane, or counseling them on how to sell their business at 35 and still maintain their lifestyle (“it’s a long runway when you’re 35”).
“It’s very scary when an entrepreneur sells their company. I’ve had billionaires ask me if they have enough money and I have to hold myself back from shaking them and saying ‘ARE YOU KIDDING ME?’ ”
But our conversation in his offices at the top of Greenwich Avenue keeps drifting to neighbors with more urgent life decisions. Erdmann’s affability seems well-suited for dealing with people at both ends of the financial spectrum. He is clearly — and justifiably — proud of what the shelter has accomplished in recent years to take more innovative approaches to helping the chronically homeless, to ease the burden on the emergency room at Norwalk Hospital and to provide meals, clothing and job training to the working poor.
Erdmann, who lives in Rowayton, confesses to once maintaining his own stereotype of the homeless as “50- to 60-year-old men who drink too much and can’t hold a job.”
His second story busts both this cliché and ones about how shelters function. While visiting his 93-year-old mother-in-law at a nursing home on a recent Sunday morning, he talked to a nurse who mentioned living in Norwalk. He asked if she knew Open Door.
“I bring my grandchildren there for clothes; you have the nicest clothes there,” she replied.
Later that day he stopped at the shelter. He started chatting with a woman checking in who turned out to be a nurse at the same nursing home.
“She was going through marital issues and then lost her condo, got into a financial bind and came to the shelter to get her feet back on the ground,” Erdmann recalls.
He repeats a maxim that remains stubbornly true: “A huge percentage of Norwalk and Stamford is one paycheck away from being homeless.”
Erdmann has quicksilver gestures, but I visualize him as a man coolly balancing wealth in one hand and poverty in the other. He says he has three or four conversations a month with clients contemplating fleeing Connecticut for Florida or Wyoming. He also recognizes the impossibility of living comfortably in Fairfield County on low wages.
His third story is one he likes to tell about entering his freshman psych class at Ohio Wesleyan four decades ago. He settled in the front row and read five words on the board.
“Giving is a selfish act.”
The “18-year-old knucklehead” didn’t get it, but clearly the lesson stuck, and he strives to pass it on to his three sons.
“The most satisfying part of my life is when we’re able to be involved and help people down on their luck.”
We could use more of that kind of selfish.