Fee Overload: How I Was Sold a Costly Pension Plan with Hidden High Fees and Poor Performance

Had three different independent FAs try to sell me into high risk VCTs (despite being wholly inappropriate for my goals / financial position) - all I wanted was some one-off financial modelling that I couldn't figure out in a spreadsheet. I literally gave up trying to find an FA at that point.

My 1 experience with a financial advisor 18 years ago. I did my high school senior project on investing. So my “mentor” was this financial advisor. I had 5k from my grandmothers to invest in (my great grandmother has mutual funds for all the grandkids so I cashed mine out and my grandma also threw in $1,000 for me)

Anyway.

His can’t miss these are about to be the next big thing picks were Nokia and Pioneer energy services. So Nokia only ever went downhill, I bought I think around $16 and sold at $5 some years later. Pioneer it actually had tripled at one point to $18 then a year later it was $2 then they went bankrupt so bye bye to that money.

I was really into computers back then, I had built my own and talked to him about how everyone in gaming was using Nvidia GeForce graphics cards. He has no interest in it. I can still hear his whiny voice saying how computer industry moves so fast and there will always be some new better faster thing on the market so that would be bad to invest in. And how Nokia was going to rule the cell phone market for years and years.

I had a client who was retiring, and we were in the process of rolling over his 401(k) and pension. In our conversations, I learned that he had purchased a fixed annuity at his local bank a couple of years prior.

Since they wanted to consolidate all of their investments, they were more than comfortable transferring everything to me – but I knew that they had just taken out the fixed annuity a couple of years prior.

My inclination was that there was probably some type of surrender charge attached to it. I inquired about this to the client, and they were under the impression that there was not a surrender charge and that they could take their money; principal and interest, and walk away at any time.

Why did they believe that you ask? Because that’s what the advisor had told them. The advisor had told them they could take out the investment, take their guaranteed interest at any time, and walk away with everything without penalty. Now, once I heard that, as much as I wanted to believe them, I knew something sounded fishy. I had them call the bank and talk to the advisor to clarify how it actually worked. As it turns out, it wasn’t that way at all.

Yes, they could walk away with the principal, but all the interest that they accrued would be forfeited, and in their case, it was approximately $7,000 that they’d be leaving on the table.

Obviously, we weren’t about to give up a big chunk of money just for the sake of consolidating, so we left it as-is to revisit when the surrender period expired- which was four years away! Lesson Learned:Just because the advisor tells you something doesn’t necessarily mean it’s true. If something sounds too good to be true, ask for it in writing.