Dear Liz: I’m setting up accounts post-divorce, while learning personal finance on the fly. Is it “safe” or advisable to have all of my larger accounts — IRAs, 401(k), cash management — with the same institution, or should I spread them around? I have smaller checking and savings accounts with a good credit union.

Answer: Using a single investment firm is certainly convenient, and most people will be just fine having all their accounts in one place.

The Securities Investor Protection Corp. covers accounts up to $500,000, including up to $250,000 in cash. This insurance protects you if the brokerage fails and your cash or securities go missing.

Customers with multiple accounts often get more coverage. For example, IRAs and Roth IRAs would each get up to $500,000 in coverage, as do individual and joint brokerage accounts. A person with all four types of accounts would have $2 million in coverage. Accounts for corporations, trusts, estate executors and guardians of minors also get separate coverage. For more details, see SIPC’s brochure, “How SIPC Protects You.”

Your 401(k) has its own protections. Assets in 401(k)s are placed into trust accounts, separate from the investment firms that administer the plans and the employers that sponsor them. The money can’t be touched by creditors of either one.

A $100 fee to close a brokerage account? Really?

Dear Liz: My brokerage recently sent an updated fee list. They now are charging $100 to close an account. That seems an incredibly high fee should I choose to move my investments somewhere else. The fine print says the fee will not apply to anyone who holds at least $5 million in qualifying assets. Well that certainly isn’t me. So they’re hitting those who have the least with a ridiculously high fee when it comes time to end the account. Is this typical across the investment industry?

Answer: Unfortunately, yes, but the usual fee is closer to $75.

Many brokerages have lowered their fees in recent years, with many eliminating commissions. But the account closure fee has stuck around, probably because most people don’t think about the costs of shutting down an account after they’ve opened one.

Caught between Social Security’s two retirement ages

Dear Liz: I’ve received multiple conflicting answers from Social Security and hope you can clarify. My husband waited to collect until he was 70 and unfortunately passed away soon afterward. I am 66 and was instructed to apply for survivor benefits because I would be eligible to collect his enhanced benefit at age 66 plus two months. I received an “approval of application” letter in January 2024 and was expecting payment on March 20, but nothing! I went on the SSA.gov website and saw my status was “ineligible due to being employed or still working.” I’m an independent human resources consultant. I finally got through to Social Security on the phone and was told I wouldn’t be able to collect his benefits (which would be higher than mine due to his age and earnings) until I was at full retirement age, 66 plus six months. Is this true?

Answer: Yes. You just got squeezed between two different types of full retirement age.

Many people don’t realize they have two full retirement ages, one for retirement benefits and a slightly younger one for survivor benefits. At 66 and two months, you qualified for your full survivor benefit, meaning that the amount wasn’t reduced because of an early start. However, the earnings test applies because you hadn’t yet reached your full retirement age for retirement benefits. The earnings test reduces your benefit by $1 for every $2 you earn over a certain limit, which in 2024 is $22,320.

The good news is that the earnings test will end when you reach 66 years and six months, and you’ll start receiving your survivor benefit regardless of how much you get paid.

Liz Weston, Certified Financial Planner®, is a personal finance columnist. Questions may be sent to her at 3940 Laurel Canyon, No. 238, Studio City, CA 91604, or by using the “Contact” form at asklizweston.com.

In the end, veteran investor Nelson Peltz came away with a big win in his battle with the Walt Disney Co.

Peltz’s Trian Fund Management sold its Disney shares after Peltz lost his hard-fought campaign to join the Burbank entertainment giant’s board of directors and exert influence over the Magic Kingdom.

Last month, Disney shareholders rejected the billionaire’s proxy bid, but Trian still profited by selling its Disney stake to reap about $1 billion on its investment, according to business news network CNBC, which quoted an unnamed person familiar with the matter.

Trian reportedly capitalized on Disney’s recent run-up in stock price, when shares traded at about $120 in early April.

Since then, Disney’s stock has fallen. Shares were hovering around $101 on Thursday.

Still, Disney is up 12% since the beginning of the year as Chief Executive Bob Iger seeks to demonstrate that he’s properly managing the company to achieve success in the streaming era.

While Disney strenuously campaigned against Peltz and his ally, former Disney executive Jay Rasulo, the company has heeded some of Peltz’s calls, including implementing rounds of rigorous cost-cutting, resulting in about 8,000 positions being eliminated.

Representatives of Trian and Disney declined to comment.

In what became Disney’s most consequential board election in 20 years, Peltz repeatedly hammered the company for its missteps and bungled succession efforts.

Peltz’s proxy campaign zoomed in on Disney’s subpar stock performance over the last five years, uneven box-office results and $71-billion purchase of much of Rupert Murdoch’s 21st Century Fox, which provided Disney with more library content and intellectual property, including “Avatar,” “The Simpsons,” and “Deadpool.” Peltz and some analysts viewed the Murdoch deal as a costly mistake.

Another sore point was Disney board members’ decision to hire Bob Chapek as CEO four years ago and extending Chapek’s contract less than six months before directors forced him out. Chapek, who was Iger’s handpicked replacement, made several costly blunders, including allowing Disney to become fodder for the culture war campaign of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.

Disney also racked up billions of dollars in losses on streaming.

Peltz unveiled Trian’s proxy fight last fall. It was his second stab at winning a board seat, but the activist investor withdrew his initial effort in early 2023 after Iger first announced his cost-cutting plans. Last fall, Peltz reportedly added to his Disney stake. In October, the stock was trading below $90 a share.

Peltz mustered the votes of about 30% of shareholders who voted in April’s election, according to a Securities and Exchange filing.

Iger received 94% of shareholders’ support — a clear victory that reinforced his popularity among large institutional investors as well as small shareholders who are nostalgic for the company, its characters and theme parks. Three-quarters of “retail” shareholders (as opposed to larger institutional investors, such as mutual funds) voted in support of Disney’s slate of 12 board nominees, which included Iger.

Despite their proxy battle victory, Iger and his management team remain under pressure to accelerate the company’s turnaround plans, including efforts to make its streaming business profitable. Disney must preserve the power of its ESPN sports empire, and other TV channels, while also reinvigorating its movie pipeline and expanding its theme parks and resorts business.

Disney has announced a $60-billion investment in theme parks, resorts and cruise lines over the next decade. In April, the Anaheim City Council approved a $1.9-billion expansion plan for the sprawling Disneyland Resort.

Disney board members must also find a capable successor for Iger — a duty that has eluded the company for years. Iger’s current contract runs through 2026.

Staff writer Samantha Masunaga contributed to this report.

Claims of wage theft filed by California workers are routinely left in limbo for years by state investigators who are facing a massive backlog of cases, according to a recent audit of the California Labor Commissioner’s office.

As a result of the sluggish pace, workers are left waiting years to receive money they may be owed, the audit found.

When claims are eventually investigated, the Labor Commissioner’s Office often does not recover wages. The audit found that in cases where workers requested help recovering their wages, they received the full amount owed to them only 12% of the time.

The backlog of unresolved cases has more than doubled in the last five years, from 22,000 claims in fiscal year 2017-18 to 47,000 in fiscal year 2022-23, the audit found.

The Labor Commissioner would need “hundreds of additional positions under its existing process to resolve the backlog,” California State Auditor Grant Parks wrote in a letter accompanying the audit to Gov. Gavin Newsom and state lawmakers Wednesday.

Wage theft occurs when employers fail to pay minimum wage or overtime rates or force workers to forgo legally required break times.

State law requires that a decision be made on a wage claim within 135 days from when it was first filed. But the Labor Commissioner’s office often takes two years or longer to process wage claims — more than six times longer than the law allows, the audit found.

Some 2,800 claims involving upwards of $63.9 million in unpaid wages have been open for five years or longer, according to the audit.

“Workers have virtually no recourse because it takes so long. We need emergency hiring of these positions. We need the state to deal with it,” Lorena Gonzalez, head of the California Labor Federation, said of the audit’s findings.

Gonzalez said the audit underscored a problem that labor advocates and others have pointed out for years. She criticized the state for failing to act with urgency to better protect workers vulnerable to exploitation, especially low-wage laborers.

“Where is the outrage? How many hearings have [lawmakers] had on retail theft, on crime? Well this is a crime, and it happens every day to working people.”

The Los Angeles, Oakland, and Long Beach field offices of the labor commissioner have among the biggest backlogs of claims and on average take the longest to close wage theft investigations, according to the audit.

A slow hiring process and low salaries that make it difficult for the agency to retain staff and fill positions have contributed to the high vacancy rates. Vacancy rates in field offices ran as high as 45% in Santa Ana, 44% in Sacramento, 38% in Oakland and 35% in Los Angeles and Long Beach as of June 2023.

But even if all vacant positions were filled, the labor commissioner would be short of the manpower needed to address the backlogs and process claims in the time frame required by law, the audit found. The labor commissioner has about 315 positions, about a third of which are vacant. But it needs 892 full-time positions, nearly three times as many, the audit said.

The audit found that poor technological infrastructure that has led to inaccuracies, and spotty data in the agency’s case management system has also made it difficult for the office to track claims.

California’s Department of Industrial Relations, which includes the Labor Commissioner’s Office, said it “is committed to finding ways to continually improve its programs and ensure that it meets its mission to protect and improve the health, safety and economic well-being of over 18 million wage earners.”

The department’s director, Katrina S. Hagen. said the division is working on improvements to the case management system and conducting a study of staff salaries to improve retention.

And last week, the Department of Industrial Relations announced $8.5 million in grants to 17 local prosecutors to run wage theft enforcement programs locally and bring criminal charges against problem employers.

Other California agencies responsible for enforcing labor laws have also been beset by staffing problems and claims of ineffectiveness. The Division of Occupational Safety and Health, known as Cal/OSHA, is grappling with a 38% job vacancy rate and faced sharp criticism at a February hearing of the Assembly Committee on Labor and Employment, where farmworkers testified that they’d been exposed to extreme heat and pesticides on the job.

The release of the audit comes as lawmakers and lobbyists are in negotiations over the future of California law that labor leaders say is a crucial alternative for dealing with wage theft and other workplace abuses.

The law, known as the Private Attorneys General Act, or PAGA, gives workers the right to file lawsuits against their employers over back wages and to seek civil penalties on behalf of themselves and other employees.

A business-backed initiative seeking to repeal the law will appear on the ballot in November, unless a deal is reached in the next few weeks.

The California Labor Federation and other labor groups are backing Assembly Bill 2288, introduced by Ash Kalra (D-San José), that aims to give PAGA more teeth by allowing courts to order employers to correct violations. Advocates say it will help ensure bad behavior by employers is halted, rather than simply awarding a settlement and allowing a company to go back to problematic practices.