Agreed. An alternative to those who don’t want to pay for advice, is to read a lot.
What advice will a financial advisor give you? The name of a mutual fund to get into? Encourage you to get into the commodities market? If anyone here has met with an advisor, I’d be curious to know.
Once I met with an advisor, and he recommended we get disability insurance. The premiums ran about 5% of our salary, so we took the chance on not needing it. Instead, we put the money into mutual funds, and it was a better move than throwing it away on disability. We figured if my husband became disabled, I would work. Besides, with a desk job, you’d need to be pretty messed up to not be able to work. A life insurance salesman talked us in to a whole life policy. That was a bad mistake, but we fell for it. I once fell for a financial advisor’s Franklin Templeton Funds. She was pushing them, because she earned 5% on all the money I put in. That’s called a load fund. I had that same fund since 1986, and kept waiting to recoup the losses it had early on. It still hasn’t.
If you get a financial advisor, make sure it’s fee-only. Make sure he gives you his rate of return on his recommendations over the last 20 years. How did he do in the previous bear markets? If he doesn’t have 20 years in the market, get someone else; don’t be his guinea pig. Most people are afraid to ask for a track record. If you don’t ask, you could end up with a guy whose a great salesman, but a lousy investor.
Ask your advisor which asset classes he recommends. Don’t get a guy who only recommends stocks and bonds. You need someone who knows when is the right time to buy real estate and commodities.
My big mistake is that I was brainwashed by the Wall Street marketing ploy of investing for the long haul in stocks, dollar cost averaging, keeping my money in even during down times. Well, because of that sh*tty advice, I missed out on the real estate boom. I missed out on buying gold when it was still $300/oz. Where were the supposed experts then?
Ask this financial advisor if he was recommending people buy gold back when it was $300/oz, and real estate to flip in 1999. If not, he’s not worth the money!
As you can see, I am very skeptical of financial advisors.
If anyone can give me the name of a financial advisor who meets the above criteria, I will eat my words, and I will go speak to him and pay him myself. Does anyone that smart even exist?
I figure if no one is smarter than me, has a better track record than beating the S&P500 index fund, I can do it on my own. Then I have only myself to blame if it doesn’t work out.
I read in the paper today that investors lost billions of dollars in the stock market in the past week. I lost zilch.
Anyone listening to the advice of a financial advisor probably was in the stock market and lost money.
