Human Financial Advisor Horror Stories

I’ll preface that this is more of a rant and confession than anything else. I am a 29 year old “financial planner” for a major brokerage firm that I have been with for 7 years now. I am always so impressed as I scroll through this sub the savviness of the average poster - from saving strategies, bogle head inspired investment strategies, and the overall effective simplicity. In my day job as a “planner” (salesman) we are taught to muddy the waters, complicate the process, and create fear to sell simplistic and unnecessary financial services. I wish I could give real advice ( max out, index, save, etc) but that simply won’t pay the bills. Saving aggressively, maxing tax deferred accounts, and indexing is a simple yet the most effective strategy that anyone can do.

It gives me quite the morale dilemma of pursuing a career in something I don’t believe there’s real value in. In my opinion, for 95+% of folks there is no need for a financial planner/advisor. The only real value in paying for any type of financial service I see is a tax advisor for those in complex situations; but there is simply no need for a financial advisor. I love the planning side of my career, but absolutely hate the sales side, which has stalled my career progress because I have turned down promotions to avoid the majority of my income becoming commission based and to stay in the space of helping rather than selling, which is hurting my own income / FIRE goals.

If I could go back in time, I would have become a CPA or perhaps an estate planner - where real value can be provided. Anyways, I know I am preaching to the choir here but, don’t get sucked in by a financial planner/advisor.

No horror story, they just made more money out of me than I made out of them, so in a way they taught me a useful lesson. This was back in the 90s, when we were all simpler folk.

In the fall of the year 2005 and when the real estate market was going crazy and all kinds of real estate investors were giving speeches and masquerading as advisors, I attended a local seminar about real estate investing.

I already had my rural land property/investment business model developed and most of my current advisors in place. A mortgage broker was speaking about loans for real estate.

These so called mortgage financial advisors were recommending people take interest only loans to fund their real estate purchases because the rates were low and it cash flows easily. There are many problems with this dumb advice.

Here are some:

• Debt at some point has to be paid back. Anybody who has done any investing and used debt with real estate, stocks, or a business knows this. Delaying indefinitely paying off a debt is foolish.
• Even if an interest only loan for any type of investment cash flows today, it might not tomorrow, next month, or next year. The investment might quit paying. For example:
• The tenant lost his/her job. The property flip did not work as the foundation crack was not discovered during the euphoria when the property was bought. Funds (from more debt) were needed to fix the crack when an engineer who looked at the property to buy it discovered it.

Ugh, I'm so frustrated. I thought we were doing a good thing for ourselves, but now I think we are trapped. Full backstory: A friend recommended their "financial advisor" to us. We thought, "Great! We've been meaning to meet with someone... we have a kid on the way, and my husband isn't putting away anything toward retirement since starting his new job in August."

So, we set up a phone meeting with this friend from Northwestern Mutual. She gives us a call, and we end up speaking with her for over an hour. She asks us lots of questions—what we are looking for (we tell her we want to set up retirement stuff for my husband and explore maybe putting some of our $17k in savings into CDs or mutual funds). She asks us questions about when we see ourselves retiring, how "aggressive" we are, etc. All good stuff. We hang up and agree to talk again in a week when she will give us a plan.

Cut to a week later, we're having another phone meeting, and she emails me THE PLAN. It's many, many pages, basically explaining what we have vs. what we will need if we want to retire. But she mostly just talks about how we need more life insurance. "Sure," we think. Maybe we do need more life insurance. She explains that my husband needs at least $1 million in life insurance and I need $500k (we both already have $150k policies through work). This is news to us, but we hear her out. She also spends a ton of time explaining how we need to have disability insurance. Again, we think, "Maybe we do." So we spend the greater part of an hour and a half talking about life insurance and long-term disability insurance. She briefly mentions we should be maxing out my Roth IRA and could perhaps start one for my husband.

We hang up with plans to talk again in a week and sign some paperwork. Over the next week, my husband and I really realize that we don't want disability insurance (she quoted us paying like $170/month), and we didn't feel we needed more life insurance at this time (she had us paying $340/month in permanent and $125/month in term). But we were okay maxing out my Roth at $450/month. We also wanted to explore stocks/bonds/CDs/mutual funds more (like we initially told her). So, I sent this all to her in an email before our next meeting. She responded with, "OK, great! Sounds good... talk soon."

Cut to another phone meeting, where she would talk with us about our updated PLAN. She emails us the NEW PLAN while we're on the phone. LITERALLY NOTHING IS CHANGED. She proceeds to spend the next hour convincing us why we need life insurance and disability insurance. My husband and I are both pushovers and listen to the whole spiel again. Every time we bring up a reason why we don't feel like we need it, she tells us how wrong we are. I mean, she's the professional, we thought. I still expressed my disinterest in disability insurance but wasn't completely closing the door on life insurance. She kept guilt-tripping me about "what will your kids have if one of you dies!"

By the end of the conversation, I hadn't agreed to anything except to roll over my Roth to Northwestern. She had me give her my bank routing info to get "the paperwork started." She also said she was going to be sending me a bunch of stuff to sign in the next few weeks, but it was just to apply for things... nothing was set in stone. We could just see what the insurance company was going to quote us, and we still weren't committed to anything. "Ugh, fine," I thought. She said a small amount might be taken out of my checking, but it was just to make sure "the charges are able to go through when we start moving more money to my Roth."

So a week or two goes by, and I see a ~$30 charge go through for "disability insurance"—WHICH I TOLD HER I DIDN'T WANT! And I just realized... this doesn't feel good. It doesn't seem right. She's not listening to what we want. She still hasn't addressed our interest in CDs/mutual funds/stocks, which we initially came to her for. I spent the weekend doing my due diligence—spending a few hours on r/personalfinance, NerdWallet, just googling in general about what my husband and I should really be doing. I decided to call the whole thing off with Northwestern.

It's been a nightmare trying to cut off ties with her. I was kind and courteous through the first couple of emails and subsequent texts: "We really appreciate your time but have decided to pull out. Again, thank you." She is being evasive and manipulative, telling us we are completely wrong and still need to work with her. At this point, I have just ignored any further communication. It has just been a really bad experience.

But THE REAL REASON I still feel like I can't completely ignore her is that I asked her several times when I should expect to see a refund for the disability insurance THAT I DID NOT WANT AND DID NOT AGREE TO. She just dances around the question. I'm also worried because I've gotten a "bill" (no charges yet) in the mail for the $340/month in permanent, $125/month in term, and $170 in short-term disability.

Is there anything I can do to make sure I don't get charged for this? If I communicate with her any further, she just tries to talk to us about why we need to invest with her, etc.

WHAT DO WE DO? She is being shady AF.