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I'm a Financial Advisor..

June 11th, 2008 at 09:19 pm

to my sister. She's a year younger and married. Her husband recently changed jobs and their term insurance was up. So they scheduled an appointment with a friend of a friend.

Long story short the agent tried to sell them a variable annuity for her DH to roll his 401k into. The fund had an expense ratio of 1.75%!! He also suggested whole life insurance again.

She called me before and after the meeting. I gave her some questions to ask. Turns out based on my advise she was ticked at the agent for seeming to not take their best interests to heart.

My suggestion was for her husband to simply roll the 401k over to Fidelity IRA where she currently has hers. The expense ratios are significantly less and there are no surrender charges. The don't need the death benefit that the annuity provides because they have term insurance and no kids.

So for now they are leaving their term the same and rolling the 401k to Fidelity. She really wants to start learning more about basic investing decisions. She joked that she should check out some kind of book for dummies. So, today I picked up Personal Finance for Dummies at the library to see what I think about it's basic information.

It's nice that she feels comfortable enough to call me. I do have more experience since I worked at a mutual fund company for a time and was registered with my series 6 license.

How many of you use a professional advisor?

2 Responses to “I'm a Financial Advisor..”

  1. sagegirl Says:
    1213218076

    We usually read everything we can get our hands on. Then, if we still have questions, we call Hubby's uncle. He is a farmer but was a former banker and has lots of investment experience. Plus, besides being a good man, he is family and we trust him. He has our best interest at heart. I have thought of going to a professional, but have always worried that I might get bad advice.

  2. gamecock43 Says:
    1213227099

    i use a financial advisor, but I rarely talk, use him. I use him as a voice of reason to oversee the bulk of $$ I have. But we have decided to let the $$ sit in the stock market until 30 yrs from now when I use it for retirement..so why am I paying him? I like having someone smarter than me, more objective than me available for the one or two times a year I do have questions. Plus I see him as insurance for in case something goes majorly wrong in the economy, he will know what to do, wheras it would take me months of research to get a clue of what is going on, let alone what to do.

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