Pressure Tactics and Poor Advice

In the fall of the year 2005 and when the real estate market was going crazy and all kinds of real estate investors were giving speeches and masquerading as advisors, I attended a local seminar about real estate investing.

I already had my rural land property/investment business model developed and most of my current advisors in place. A mortgage broker was speaking about loans for real estate.

These so called mortgage financial advisors were recommending people take interest only loans to fund their real estate purchases because the rates were low and it cash flows easily. There are many problems with this dumb advice.

Here are some:

• Debt at some point has to be paid back. Anybody who has done any investing and used debt with real estate, stocks, or a business knows this. Delaying indefinitely paying off a debt is foolish.
• Even if an interest only loan for any type of investment cash flows today, it might not tomorrow, next month, or next year. The investment might quit paying. For example:
• The tenant lost his/her job. The property flip did not work as the foundation crack was not discovered during the euphoria when the property was bought. Funds (from more debt) were needed to fix the crack when an engineer who looked at the property to buy it discovered it.

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.

We are in the midst of looking elsewhere as we speak. Our guy is not untrustworthy. It’s just that when I ask for a simple projected income statement for post-retirement, he worked for two weeks on it and said he just couldn’t produce one. It seemed like a simple request.