Dark Side of Financial Services

Excellent advisors communicate clearly exactly how bad the markets have been and can be.

To safeguard your money, you must be able to extricate yourself from any bad investment quickly. Of course, the companies that sell mistakes don’t want you to be able to do that, so they use financial hooks to hold your money captive.

There are several investment safeguards you should insist on. One is to avoid any investment opportunity that sounds too good to be true.

Probably the most important question you can ask of anyone offering you financial advice is, “Do you have a legal obligation to act in my best interests?”

Currently, stockbrokers can offer the same services as Fee-Only financial planners without being accountable to the same fiduciary standards. This exemption to the Investment Advisers Act of 1940 has been called the “Merrill Lynch rule.”

If you rely on a commission-based financial product salesperson, you will probably be sold the wrong kind of funds.