Whole life insurance before...your 401k?
Not advice that I was given, but I've worked with plenty of clients who were told by someone else to buy whole life insurance BEFORE investing into IRA or 401(k)...young, no kids, no spouse...just bad financial advisors looking for commissions.
Related Horror Stories
Soundbites and Sales Tactics: Why I Couldn’t Trust a Single Financial Advisor with My Money
I’ve had initial chats with two, and met two at parties. No horror stories, but all four left me certain that I wouldn’t trust them with a penny of my money. The two I met socially gave me the strong impression they had no idea what they were doing and just parroted dubious soundbites like “you’ll never lose money in property” or “you can’t go wrong with bonds”.
One had been in agriculture before getting a job at his father-in-law’s advisory firm.
I tried to chat to them about more complex post-recession low-interest rate stuff and they kinda changed the subject and just went back to soundbites. The two I actually spoke to about getting advice, one didn’t know how to deal with crypto and promptly ghosted me, the other also appeared to lose interest once it was clear I wasn’t just gonna buy life insurance and commission products. All four did the 1980s sales-y bullshit like using my first name constantly (one of them calling me by the wrong name over and over).
So (while I know every industry has its bad apples), my own personal experience has been that 4 out of 4 had strong scammy used car salesman / estate agent vibes. So basically, they’re the last people I’d hand over money to.I manage my ~£0.5m portfolio myself.
Whole life insurance as an investment vehicle
The one stands out and given by multiple of professional or so-called professional is to buy a "Whole Life Insurance" as an investment vehicle plus life insurance coverage vs. a "Term Life Insurance" policy.
Just do some calculations of the future value (Excel formula FV) in 20 years of the estimated monthly premium cost for a $1 million Whole Life Insurance vs. a 20 year Term Life Insurance (for the rate of return, you may assume 8%, in some estimates the long term retun of the stock market if you invest that money in Index Mutual Funds.) – you'll be SHOCKED!
Fee Overload: How I Was Sold a Costly Pension Plan with Hidden High Fees and Poor Performance
I went to see one about setting up a private pension because I don't get one through my employer (employed through an offshore company). Got charged about 150 quid for them to go away and "research" some options for me (probably very little research to be done; they already have a standard set of funds that they use through Openwork). For the first year they wanted 35% of my contributions.
The fund that they "found" for me (something Graphene, can't remember the name of it and I'm not at home to check) consisted of several individual funds to apparently lessen the risk of a single fund manager going to shit. In total the funds consisted of about 70% UK equities (why?), had rubbish past performance when compared to a global index tracker and would've cost me well over 2 or 3% per year (can't remember the exact number sorry), plus about 1% per year to the financial advisor for "management" after the initial 35% for the first year.
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