How My Financial Advisor Profited More Than I Did

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.

I had lots of commission fuelled bad advice from so called ‘financial advisors’.However one piece of advice really sticks out as the worst and also the turning point in my investment life.

The first part of the scam was my crooked accountant recommending an Executive Pension Plan at around age 34.

A pension planner was wheeled into my office and I was signed up and within a few days was then paying 250 GBP/Mth into this wizard investment that would give me a pension at age 60 totalling a zillion GBP p.a. OK first two rip offs, crooked accountant got a nice lump sum and commission for the next 10 years and pension planner got a lifetime rake off of everything I paid into the plan. In fact for the first two years all of the contributions I was making went into their pockets.

Fast forward a few years and the pension planner is back and well guess what my plan is underperforming so I need to increase the payments to 1,000 GBP per month. Holy shit ! I sign the papers and away we go. Now being curious, I do some investigation about how much commission I was paying. For the next two years half of my extra payment goes straight to the pension guy.

That was 9,000 GBP so I could see where my pension was going, exactly nowhere except into the advisors trouser pocket. Well that was it payments stopped and I realised I was being ripped off on everything, pension, investment plans, insurance the whole nine yards. Roll on 6 months I had my own pension fund and I was the trustee, I also had an insurance broker business with a very important client, me.

I never looked back and educated myself and will never ever in a million years take any shit from so called financial advisors. Look after your own money because if these guys were any good they would not need money from a loser like you. Remember Bernie Madhoff, there are plenty more out there.

I am 27 years old and recently inherited about $700,000. My family has a financial advisor through a more prominent firm, but I can not trust the guy. He is charging +2% fee on our total sum. He got a lot of customers, so I feel like he does not have enough time/energy to focus on my wealth.

I have been studying/reading and thinking about doing it by myself through Vanguard's index funds. I'm thinking put majority of my money in couple index funds and let it sit for years without making adjustments. However, I am pretty scared that I'm going to blow all my money.

Some say I should hire a financial advisor, but it seems like FA are all trying to do whatever is in THEIR best interest (although they say that they will be my fiduciary).

Edit: I'm sorry. I don't think I was clear regrading the fee he is charging us. 2% is one time fee as long as I leave it in that designated mutual fund. What I meant by total sum is $ I will put into a mutual fund and after that i guess there are some "hidden" fees. I guess the fee is set by each mutual fund company and he gets a little portion of that 2%.