It has been said many times in this forum. If you hire an advisor, make sure they are a fiduciary for you 100% of the time! Get it in writing!
If you don't, consider yourself warned! (see the below article from Bloomberg). Retirement towns like TV are known for sales reps selling retirees products they don't need. The article says that Variable annuities, high fee funds, non-traded REITs are among the worst products for investors.
Cut and paste this to your Advisor. I encourage you to take action. Good luck to all. Markets are at an all-time high and this is the 2nd longest bull market in history.
Dear Advisor,
Times are challenging for retirees and I want to make sure I fully understand our relationship and how you get paid. Please sign the following and send back to me.
• I will be a fiduciary for you 100% of the time for all of your accounts. Taxable, IRA, 401k
• I shall always act in good faith, with prudence and with candor.
• I shall always put the client’s best interest first.
• I shall be proactive in my disclosure of any conflicts of interest that may impact you.
• I will provide to each client full and fair disclosure of all important facts, including full transparency of how we are paid by the client or other companies.
• I shall not accept any referral fees or compensation that is contingent upon the purchase or sale of a financial product. No commissions or revenue sharing unless fully disclosed in advance.
• I shall disclose my advisor/consulting fee, any commissions, any ongoing operating expenses.
FIDUCIARY \DEFINITION\: A person legally appointed and authorized to hold assets in trust for another person. The fiduciary manages the assets for the benefit of the other person, rather than for his or her own profit. (source: Investopedia.com) \USAGE\: A trustee/registered investment advisor, who is held to a “fiduciary standard of care”, looks after the assets of another person on that person’s behalf, is fully transparent, and required to disclose any potential conflicts of interest
I agree to the above document.
_____________________________ Name of Advisor/Consultant (print)
_____________________________ Signature of Advisor/Consultant
_____________________________ Title of Advisor/Consultant
_____________________________ Date
Fiduciary Rule Fight Brews While Bad Financial Advisers Multiply - Bloomberg --Why You Still Can’t Trust Your Financial Adviser with charts
"While Washington wrestles with the fate of the Fiduciary Rule, the financial advice landscape remains supremely dangerous. Three professors recently analyzed a decade of disciplinary data on 1.2 million financial advisers. What they found is decidedly unpleasant:
- At the average firm, 8 percent of advisers have a record of serious misconduct.
- Nearly half of those 8 percent held on to their jobs after being caught. About half of the rest got jobs at other financial firms. In other words, a year after serious misconduct, about three-quarters of advisers found to have wronged clients are still working.
- It gets worse: Some 38 percent of those misbehaving advisers later go on to hurt even more clients.
- You might think bigger firms would be more diligent, but you’d be wrong. At some large firms, more than 15 percent of advisers have records of serious misconduct. The highest was Oppenheimer & Co., where 20 percent had such black marks. Oppenheimer responded to the study, first published a year ago, by saying it replaced managers and made changes to hiring, technology, and compliance procedures.
- Predators typically seek out the weak, and financial advisers are no different: The study shows that those with misconduct records are concentrated in counties with fewer college graduates and more retirees.
The unique nature of the investing business makes it easier to exploit client ignorance. Investing is complicated, with sometimes-intentionally impenetrable jargon, and customers must trust their advisers in the same way they trust their doctors: If an expert makes a recommendation, you tend to follow it, whether that means getting heart surgery or a variable annuity.
“Some firms ‘specialize’ in misconduct and attract unsophisticated customers,” the researchers write.
More astute investors aren’t entirely at the mercy of advisers. Certain products are so expensive and so typically underperform that their mere presence in your portfolio can suggest you’re getting bad advice. Variable annuities, high-fee mutual funds, and non-traded real estate investment trusts, or REITs, are good examples. Non-traded REITs charge, on average, upfront fees of 13.2 percent, while delivering returns about half those of traded REITs, which are also much easier to buy and sell."