Identity for Profit
In 2005, I was advised by a group of real estate investors. One who says he owns 50 different properties with many partners. He advised if I do not have money for investing, I should use my identity for prospect investors to use to purchase property and I get a small share. At the time, people made lot of money and different kind of real estate financial schemes.
Definitely it is a bad advice because if the investors default the loans, you are ultimately responsible for the loans and the properties are under the water.
Whole life insurance before...your 401k?
Not advice that I was given, but I've worked with plenty of clients who were told by someone else to buy whole life insurance BEFORE investing into IRA or 401(k)...young, no kids, no spouse...just bad financial advisors looking for commissions.
Fee Overload: How I Was Sold a Costly Pension Plan with Hidden High Fees and Poor Performance
I went to see one about setting up a private pension because I don't get one through my employer (employed through an offshore company). Got charged about 150 quid for them to go away and "research" some options for me (probably very little research to be done; they already have a standard set of funds that they use through Openwork). For the first year they wanted 35% of my contributions.
The fund that they "found" for me (something Graphene, can't remember the name of it and I'm not at home to check) consisted of several individual funds to apparently lessen the risk of a single fund manager going to shit. In total the funds consisted of about 70% UK equities (why?), had rubbish past performance when compared to a global index tracker and would've cost me well over 2 or 3% per year (can't remember the exact number sorry), plus about 1% per year to the financial advisor for "management" after the initial 35% for the first year.
Are all financial advisors shady??
I've had a real issue with the "financial advising" industry for quite sometime.
It's all 20 somethings trying to sell you some insurance product. They do this because they are commission based so the incentives aren't oriented to the clients best interests, especially if the client is just starting out in their financial journey.
I'm not sure if it gets any better as you get more wealth either, as they lump you into an AUM based product and the service is some annual/quarterly review even though the advisor hasn't been focused on your portfolio because of the commission based incentives.
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