Paying for Underperformance

I once had a person come to me who was very disgruntled with their current financial advisor. They had lost more money than they’d wanted to and really didn’t understand what they had. When I had a chance to take a look at their mutual fund portfolio, I noticed that all they had were B-Share mutual funds.

For those of you who don’t know, B-Shares, for the most part, are now non-existent. Although I can’t be certain why, my hunch is that they aren’t around anymore because too many advisors abused them. If they could still sell them, the advisor could make a handsome commission, and the client would never know.

Now, it’s not the commission on the B-Share that makes them so bad; it’s the fact that most of them had a six- to seven-year surrender period. That means if you buy the fund, you’re going to have to hold it for at least six or seven years before you can liquidate it without a penalty.

The client in my office had no idea what a B-Share was, and most importantly, had no idea that she had a surrender charge attached to it. So here she is—stuck in investments that had lost more money for her than she had wanted, and she can’t do anything about it. If she did sell it, she’d have to pay a surrender charge on top of her losses. Talk about a slap in the face.

Lesson learned: Read all the fine print and make sure you understand if your investment product has any type of surrender charge attached to it.

I was paying an advisor $8k per year. He never beat the market and often underperformed. Lovely guy, but once I had enough time to look into it all (the lack of time is WHY I got an advisor in the first place), I realised I was being utterly reamed given the size of my portfolio.

Both of my parents saved their money with one of the giants in this field (as tempting as it is, I will not name them). When you visit their offices, there is lots of polished wood, hushed tones, and big conference rooms as they very seriously do their job of turning the assets entrusted to them into more money.

I was executor for both of my parents' estates (they were divorced), so I got an up-close-and-personal look at what the investing company was doing, but only after the fact. My father thought of himself as a savvy investor, so he managed his money himself. He was, in reality, the epitome of the “Poor Dad” and couldn’t find a good investment with a flashlight, a compass, and someone pointing him right at it.

My mother was the polar opposite; she totally trusted this investment company. Over more than 50 years, they both managed their retirement assets this way. While my mother “won” this race because she had more money when she passed, the fact is that if you look at how much money she handed over to them and how little they actually did with it, it’s just sad.

When it was time to unwind her accounts, she was diversified to the point of “diworsification." There was no rhyme or reason for what she was invested in. It was as if the plan was to see if there was a possibility to buy a little bit of everything. She was in every high-load mutual institutional fund you could possibly find, and a smattering of international institutional funds as well. What a mess.

They wanted to hand this over to the heirs as-is and not sell any of it. I insisted they cash all of this mess out and only transfer the money to the heirs. They did this for everything except her IRA, which they transferred as-is. I received $13,000 (give or take) worth of 20 different mutual funds. That’s just nuts.

So, don’t be swayed by the big conference rooms and the fancy offices with their name on the top of the building. These folks are totally in it for themselves, and if they make you some money, it was by accident.