Churned and burned

I was 29 and rolled my 401k from Virginia Tech to an “investment guy” at my bank. He was the star football player in high school and had no actual qualifications for investments. I rolled my $40,000 into the bank investment account. In less than 90 days it was down to $18,000 in value.

I had them sell everything and rolled it back out to another firm. When I complained the investment guy said “you are only 29 and you will make it back.” Yeah, but it took me 5 years to build up that $40,000 and he destroyed more than half that in 3 months.

Put it this way, have you ever been to a circus? You have! Well, remember those people who made you laugh? Finance advisers can also do this. But they can also make you cry. Here’s a funny story—true as well.

We had a clown, visited us as they do for many years, charging us fees, etc. Also, fees that were not revealed to us, which we discovered later. Well, after 13 years of having him sponge off us, we realized he had F.C.ED us, big style. He said the investments were not taxable as they were a specific type of investment.

Well, we realized these were taxable when we questioned him, asking, "Why did you set these investments if they are taxable?" He ran away and left us with a tax bill of 13 years, plus interest.

People will say, "Why did you not make your own enquiries into what is taxable and what is not?" Well, the answer to that is because we were paying a professional.

Well, it cost us dearly, so make sure it doesn’t happen to you. Leave the clowns in the circus!

My husband’s family has used a boutique firm of financial advisors for years, and honestly, they are probably the best of the best. Independent, fee-for-service—they are very good at what they do. However, I still have some massive issues with them.

Essentially, they have overcomplicated everyone’s finances to a point where the family is now reliant on them for everything. They could probably never extract themselves from their services even if they wanted to. I think this is their ultimate business model. My in-laws have a highly complex portfolio of 30-40 investments (shares, managed funds, etc.), and yet their fund grows less than my simple VAS/VGS portfolio. They pay these guys something insane like $30K per year in fees.

The same firm took on my sister as a client, despite her having extremely simple and minimal finances, charging her $5K per year for insurance and tax advice and complicating her super and other things to the point that now she can’t manage it by herself. I think they honestly should have told her she didn’t need a financial advisor.

Prior to learning about finances and “going it alone,” they had my husband involved in several managed funds that were charging him 1.5% per year and making around 5-6% before fees. Way worse than a simple ETF. I worked out that his money grew about half the amount it would have if we had just been using ETFs from the beginning. And yet, when we mentioned our change of plan, they still recommended we didn’t go with ETFs and stayed with the managed fund. It didn’t make sense.

Again, my theory is simply that they don’t charge commissions on these things, but by having them manage our money and invest into funds for us, they can charge us fees for service and keep things sufficiently complex so we need to keep using them year after year. I think it’s all a bit of a rort, really.