Pushed to the Edge: How Three Financial Advisors Tried to Sell Me High-Risk Investments I Didn't Need
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.
Related Horror Stories
How My Wife’s Financial Planner Mismanaged Her Investments for Years
Sounds like my wife’s ex financial planner. I warned her after meeting him once before she gave him her money but she trusted him because her dad uses him (btw her dad has less than 1% of his net worth with this guy). Took me five years of doing yearly reviews with her to finally pull the money and put in index funds.
They put her in an annuity, impossible to liquidate private reits and my favorite was summer of 2020 after qe was in full force they put a third of her money in bonds. The underperformance was insane. Had it just been 10% worse than an index fund I’d be so happy.
They must be the good guys, right?
Stay away from FirstCommand! They sell themselves as "military-friendly financial advisors," but in reality they're just commissioned salespeople.
I thought I was doing the right thing as a new officer for my financial future by promptly going down to the local First Command office and signing up for their investment and life insurance products (they sponsor events on base and their "advisors" are prior military, so they must be the good guys, right?), but it took me 12 years to realize I was being taken for a giant ride.
One of the funds they had me in was so awful that when I went to liquidate it as part of transferring my assets to Vanguard, I found out that the fund had lost so much in value and so many people put in redemption requests that the fund had stopped distributions (TFCIX).
I've since moved all my assets to Vanguard, but I still have $2K in TFCIX languishing back at FirstCommand because I still can't redeem those shares to this day. Bottom line is that you can do a lot better for yourself elsewhere; don't give these guys your hard-earned money.
Churned and burned
Some time in the past, a “financial advisor” convinced me that I could make a lot of money trading commodities. Wrong! I figured out he was just “churning” me (putting me into and out of too many positions, just to earn the commission), and I closed the account, buy not until he lost 80% of my money in less than a year!
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