East Enders find their careers at home
By John
Riordan
The
The Hamptons are generally considered to be a place of leisure in the
popular imagination, but to local residents and an increasing number of
commuters the South Fork is very much an area of business in which a lot of
work gets done during the week. This fact is well understood by five
20-somethings who were born and raised on the East End and have returned here
to work at Hamptons Mortgage Corporation in East Hampton after being trained
and educated in business and finance.
Working in the
Hamptons Mortgage CEO Dan Gualtieri said he is delighted that so many area
natives have chosen to come and work for him. “I’ve got a young team of five
people who grew up here. They go out and everybody knows them. They know the
local real estate market and aren’t intimidated or overly impressed with some
people the way an outsider would be.” Mr. Gualtieri also said the youthfulness
of his five employees has helped them adapt to a changing economy better than
older people might. “What’s interesting about young people is that they’re
interested in working longer hours than most people,” he said. Mr. Wright acts
a kind of leader, both official and unofficial, to this band of young people.
“I help these guys and I work with my own clients,” he said. Finding clients
for him locally is easy because he’s a native, he said. The son of Southampton
dentist Dr. Louis Wright, Mr. Wright graduated from
Mr. Locascio grew up in Sag Harbor, where his father is a prominent builder,
and graduated from
Unsurprisingly, Mr. Locascio has many contacts in the area and in
Mr. Giruzzi, a Southampton native, said that after he earned a degree in
business and finance at
Ms. Alnwick attended
Ms. Wils, another
Remarkably, none of the five see any real disadvantages to living and working
on the
Mr. Gualtieri added that his five protegés also get
to enjoy a not wholly unpleasant opportunity to gloat in front of their old
local friends who now work in
East
End natives, left to right, Bill Wright,
JOHN RIORDAN
Financial advisor offers free help
Eduard van Raay runs Hampton-House as a
non-profit to help public
By Michael
Wright
Financial analysts and economic soothsayers are sounding an
increasingly loud alarm these days about the threat posed to the
It’s a scary prospect for all Americans, to say nothing of those who are among
millions of over-leveraged consumers, and one that could easily have been
avoided if more people had been better educated about credit, interest and
responsible borrowing.
One
For the last two years, Eduard van Raay, a financial manager for the insurance giant Mass
Mutual Financial Group, has been offering his advice on borrowing, buying and
managing your money to
From borrowing money to buying a house to debt management, credit card usage
and retirement savings, Mr. van Raay has been
educating the East End’s financially uneducated, he said, simply in hopes of
guiding them through a patch of rough seas he had seen too many founder in.
“I feel there is a gap in helping people get through a very important part of
life,” Mr. van Raay, 53, said this week. “You go to
high school and college and they don’t teach you about this kind of stuff.
These are real issues that are going to impact you in a real way.”
Mr. van Raay, 53, lives in East Hampton and runs the
Mass Mutual Financial office in
In 2004, he started Hampton-House, a non-profit organization to educate the
public on responsible borrowing practices and financial management. Mr. van Raay has used local public libraries to host a series of
free educational lectures for
Some of the biggest missteps people have made in recent years have been in the
purchasing of homes, often directly under the noses of mortgage brokers, Mr.
van Raay said. The brokers should have known that the
deals they were putting together would spell disaster for the buyers, but gave
no guidance themselves, Mr. van Raay said.
“Our society has become pretty complicated and not everybody in the marketplace
is helping the general public make the best decision for themselves,” said Mr.
van Raay, who is giving the second lecture in a
two-part series on retirement planning tomorrow, Thursday, July 12, at the East
Hampton Library. “In the old days, you had two mortgage choices, 15 year and 30
year; now you have 15 different types and there is no easy way to learn the ins
and outs of each, and a lot of mortgage brokers will tout whatever they think
will get you to make the deal.”
Adjustable rate, interest-only, and nodocumentation
mortgage loans that carry negative amortization clauses have been particularly
troublesome, Mr. van Raay said, and have left many
people in a serious financial bind.
Such loan programs were set up to accommodate businesspeople who were
purchasing houses, renovating and then selling them again in relatively short
order and wanted to keep their out-ofpocket costs as
low as possible. These specialized loans worked well for such deals, he said,
and could have been wonderful economic tools.
But low-rate loans were too often also used to allow—or encourage—first-time
home buyers to purchase houses that cost well more than what they could
actually afford. Negative amortization often meant that homeowners with
low-rate loans often found themselves owing more money at the end of the first
year of homeownership than when they started and suddenly facing rising
interest rates and mortgage premiums they couldn’t afford. When the housing
market stalled slightly in the last year, the homes suddenly may not have been
worth what was owed on them anymore and left their owners in a lurch.
Recently, the problem has been particularly evident in
“All of a sudden, when people couldn’t sell and the rates started going up,
they were in trouble,” Mr. van Raay said. “The system
lacked adequate supervision. Lending practices were not good for the consumer
and were allowed to continue unchecked.”
Hampton-House also aims to educate people about other financial matters,
particularly credit management and preparing for retirement. Much has been made
in recent years about the extent to which Americans have relied on credit to
subsidize lifestyles well beyond their incomes.
Mr. van Raay said that credit is necessary and an
important crutch for anyone if it is used wisely and handled properly. Keeping
credit cards is important to build a good credit rating and keeping track of
that rating is equally vital— but credit balances must be kept in check. He
advised that credit cards always be paid off in full to ensure that credit is
there if it is needed in an emergency.
To most people, such advice may seem obvious. But too many people are unaware of
the details of how credit can both help and hog-tie a consumer.
Much of the information on mortgages and credit management is available to the
public through a variety of channels, but people simply don’t know how to find
it, according to Mr. van Raay. Through Hampton-House
and his public lectures—a schedule of Mr. van Raay’s
lectures is available at www.hampton-house.org online—Mr. van Raay says he hopes he can start guiding those who haven’t
been shown how to manage their finances properly.
Mr. van Raay said he’s doing this probono
public service simply because he enjoys it. He likes having the knowledge that
other people need, and helping them use that knowledge to their advantage, he
said.
“If there is a way to, at least, offer this information to people, maybe
they’ll make better decisions about their finances,” he said. “My objective is
to disseminate the information and allow people to educate themselves about
important decisions in their household. I give people independent, unbiased
facts.”
Eduard van Raay at the
East Hampton Library,where he recently gave a
two-part talk on financial planning. KYRIL BROMLEY