Dark Side of Financial Services

Cross-Selling is when a financial institution incentivizes their employees to sell or recommend financial products and services that increase the financial institution’s profits. The practice is as commonplace as it is fraught with conflicts of interest.

SEC announced that 79 investment adviser firms will return more than $125 million to clients after self-reporting violations of the Advisers Act.

The expense ratio charged by your funds matters more than you may realize.

Disclosures are always necessary but rarely sufficient to fulfill fiduciary obligations.

If you own these fund families with your Ameriprise Advisor, perhaps you should consider switching to a fee-only financial advisor.

Brokers tell investors they’re trusted advisors, and then tell the courts they’re just sales people.

In addition to all of the other reasons people hate annuities, seemingly fraudulent advertising and sales techniques is a major factor.

This is called “regulatory capture” and is quite common in government regulatory agencies such as the SEC.

Ameriprise was fined $4.5 million for failing to appropriately supervise representatives who were stealing client funds.

Are you consenting to harmful conduct by your financial advisor?

That the program failed is not a surprise. That the government decided to close a failed program, however, is.

If you are one of those consumers for whom the word “annuity” is enough to make them tune out a sales presentation, congratulations! You have have probably correctly understood the real challenges these products face.

As you read other financial advice sites, be wary of the sponsored content.

It will help you in life if you can learn to distinguish between content with ulterior motives and real financial planning wisdom.

The majority of the industry many not even believe that there is a better way. But you deserve better.

Incentives matter. If you are going to get a financial advisor, you need to select a fee-only advisor because you need to find an advisor you can trust.

We find the practices of much of the financial services industry repulsive.

Another free pass for the agents of brokers-dealers to dissembling under the guise of “Regulation Best Interest.”

We were surprised by our survey of the registered firms in the Charlottesville area.

You should not trust a point in time fiduciary for even a single heart beat.

We, the shareholders, do not like being treated this way.

The SEC released an embarrassingly poor 1,000 page document.

In 2007 the Financial Planning Association won a lawsuit that it filed against the SEC to force them to enforce the registration provisions of the 1940 Investment Advisors Act. The law still isn’t enforced.

“One principal purpose of the accredited investor concept is to identify persons who can bear the economic risk of investing in these unregistered securities.”

Unfortunately, no amount of rules-based compliance can force a company to follow the principles-based fiduciary standard.

Recommending clean shares does not free the industry from conflicts of interest.

Here is the list of broker-dealers who said the CFP should not expect those with the CFP® mark to not mislead consumer.

SEC-mandated titling will not be enough to save unsuspecting consumers from non-fiduciary financial professionals.

It will be a welcome change when the CFP Board can force CFP® mark holders to remove misleading content from their websites.

Albemarle Insurance Agency’s hiring solicitation shows the difference between insurance salesmen and fee-only fiduciary advisors.

Don’t let someone else live the life you’re saving for, but also don’t rely on Investor.Gov to protect your money.

TD Ameritrade has received a large number of complaints. But apparently not enough to change their decision. If you have a TD Ameritrade account perhaps your call will help them change their minds.

One of the problems with government reporting regulations is that personal information is made widely available for abuse.

There can be great value in the sage advice of a fee-only fiduciary advisor. Even if they brought no value for their investment management, they could still bring great value for their help in comprehensive wealth management. While a competent … Read More

I normally try to refrain from “bashing the competition,” but in this case, the competition’s practices are, at least to me, a moral issue.

A few years ago, there was a great rise of so-called robo-advisers, computer programming that enabled setting a simple asset allocation on the security level and then automatic rebalancing to those targets for each security.

You would think that rebalancing a client’s portfolio would be standard in the industry. Unfortunately, it is not.

Less gouging doesn’t make T-shares meet the high principles-based fiduciary standard.

Commission-based firms want either to be exempt from the Fiduciary standard or else given the title anyway.

What does the car your advisor drives tell you about their investment and budgeting services?

There is a large difference between the motives and incentives of the sales person and those of the service person.

It is relatively easy for an adviser who has a 400 lawyer compliance department to sit through some compliance continuing education and yet never understand what attitudes and behaviors need to be changed.

If you own some mutual funds, chances are you are paying a hefty marketing price.

It should be clear that “fee-only” means “fee-only,” not “fees and third-party manager revenue-sharing and trailing mutual fund fees.”

Apparently the idea behind asset allocation is more complex than they think.

David M Zolt writes in his article “Industry needs to rid itself of misleading labels” that “profound misrepresentation is just one of the many ways the financial services field misleads customers with language.” It is absolutely true. He explains: Language … Read More

Very few consumers actually read the SEC filings for the firms they have engaged.

Any legislation which can include FINRA’s commission-based advisors will dilute what it means to be a fiduciary.

Only give someone who is required to honor your best interest the ability to trade in your account without talking to you.

A fundamental fiduciary principle is to avoid self-dealing.