[manaboutown]

Boomer, good to hear you were "asking for a friend". It did not seem to be a predicament I would expect you to find yourself in.

Over the course of my senior years some friends and relatives have mentioned to me they use "financial advisors" and I tend to cringe when I hear them tell me so. I have learned to ask no questions about whether their advisors were fee-only, fee-based or AUM since early on I received blank looks from them in response to such inquiries. Then they would start telling me how nice the advisors were and how well they had done for them, nothing quantitative of course. The husband of one widow I know had an advisor who essentially lost it all for them. I have no details but the husband eventually put a reverse mortgage on their home without his wife's knowledge before he passed on in order to buy a new Jaguar to keep up with their social set (he was a yacht salesman).

IMHO the financial world is a jungle, particularly dangerous for the uniformed. The sad thing is few people want to spend the time and make the effort to become sufficiently knowledgable about it to protect themselves from being fleeced, or even shorn a bit