Trading My 401k for a Questionable Insurance Policy
It was once suggested to me by a “financial advisor” to cash out my 401k and reinvest it into a whole life insurance policy.
Related Horror Stories
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!
My REIT Nightmare
What's the dumbest piece of advice a financial adviser has given you? Put your money in this “safe” REIT…. lost half of it AND the fund was “frozen” when the banks did their nasty back in 2008; had to wait for 5 years to get even that back.
Margin Calls Destroyed My Early Success
I had set aside some money to invest into stocks. So opened an account with Internaxx bank and took out a cheap subscription under a special offer with the Porter Stansberry tipping sheet.
It was around 2010 and I did remarkably well, quickly building up a nice little portfolio and collecting dividends and watching as the values increased. What could go wrong? I had a phone call from some broker in the UK who specialised in pre IPO stocks and floatations so listened and the guy explained how using CFD’s you could leverage up your position and take control of a much bigger slice of the action and make a huge amount of money…….. I think some rich guy like Warren Buffet once said if you do not fully understand what you are investing in just give it a miss. So a new account was opened and I started off making my fortune.
Well no, I ended up with a black hole which had these things called margin calls which gobbled up cash like there was no tomorrow. I quickly realised that this was not working and bailed out pretty quickly but then got into leveraged trading on gold……… It was an interesting 6 months and taught me that I was not really understanding what was going on and I would never cut it as a trader so there was something positive at least.
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