Don’t Pay Twins to Handle Your Investments
Posted by admin in Investing
Here's a good article by Motley Fool's Dan Caplinger about the problem many people have of paying twice for money management. It happens very easily and it blows people's returns without them even knowing it.
Say you start investing for retirement and you get a financial advisor to help you decide where your money should go. He/she makes some recommendations on mutual funds and then he/she also offers to give you ongoing guidance for a small percentage of your portfolio each year. The money's coming out of your portfolio, not your wallet, so you agree. Your new financial advisor helps you get set up with two or three mutual funds, then sits back and collects a fee from you year after year for doing absolutely nothing, because you don't understand mutual Fund Investing well enough to know that you are now paying a financial advisor each year AND paying the managers of your mutual funds.
You just figured that the financial advisor was the one who got paid to help you invest, not realizing that from this point forward your advisor doesn't have to do a thing, unless you decide to buy another mutual fund or do some minor shifting of your assets. (This will take your advisor one to two hours, for which you will pay that yearly fee.) All the while your mutual fund performance is hit by the funds' fees.
At least the mutual fund fees make sense. Those are for actually managing money, deciding whether to buy or sell stocks. That nice 1% your advisor is taking is for doing virtually nothing.
As you may be able to tell, this makes me angry. It makes me angry because I saw it happen to my mother, and when I called to tell her financial advisor that she didn't need him when her assets were already well diversified into multiple mutual funds, he gave me a long song and dance about why he really was a necessary cog in the machine. I 86'd him.
If you want some hand-holding when you invest, go to a financial advisor, but make it a one-time only thing. Have him or her make some suggestions about how you should diversify, maybe help you get started with a few mutual funds or whatever, and then be done with it. Once the money is invested, the advisor is no longer doing anything for you. And, if you decide you do want to make some changes in the future, just call the advisor again for one-time, fee-based assistance. Unless you're tremendously wealthy, there's no need to have someone taking a cut of your nest egg each year for doing nothing.
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