I didn't call you a liar. I said that you should quickly leave this thread because it could potentially damage your (extremely important to your income) world view. It is MUCH easier to sell something that you believe in than something that you believe is a horrible deal that no one should ever do. Making your regular sales pitch would be a lot harder if you knew that you were lying.

As for my knowledge of life insurance products... the ironic part is that I'm a licensed life/health agent. I no longer work in insurance because I found a MUCH better way to earn a living. Also what I sell isn't complete bull****. That does make the selling easier.

I whole heartedly disagree with pretty much all of this. There are a lot of finance companies where you can get totally complimentary guidance that doesnt cost a dime. In fact, a lot of what I read on here (90%+) are suggestions that no prudent financial professional would suggest- and really makes me facepalm a lot. No suitability analysis is done; it's kind of like...oh I dont know...people giving medical advice with no reprocussions for what they suggest.

For example, no disrespect to ahnuld at all. But do you think before he posts a suggested stock pick he has ran any analysis on any of the people's financial situation before he posts his recommendation? No. So some idiot may stumble across here, see ahnuld picked a gem a few months ago and decides to blast 50% of his net worth in to ahnulds next suggestion and that pick gets destroyed. No one was there to inform this guy of concentration risk and being properly allocated.

To the OP. Get help from a professional. To make your life easy, ask the professional the following, "Can you please tell me all the ways you are compensated on my money or my decision?" It's a tough question, but I think if you shop around you can make the best decision for yourself given that advisers answer. (Avoid people who work on straight commission.)

I agree w/ you, but asking that question shouldn't be hard at all to ask. I know quite a few FAs that will not let you leave their office on your first visit as a prospect without them explaining exactly how they get paid.

Those guys should be applauded. But a vast majority do not fully disclose all of their compensation (management fees, their cut of loads, their cut of 12-b-1, etc).

And it is my experience (I have a book of roughly 860 customers)- many people do not like to ask their local RIA these questions because many of them are family members, long time friends, friends of friends, former coworkers, etc.

I passionately disagree. One of the worst developments in finance over the last 30 years is the infantilization of the general population with regards to their own personal finances. We are told, constantly, that our finances are incredibly complex and that we require the help of a 'professional' to manage them. This is 100% pure bull****. A 'suitability analysis'? Seriously? For a doctor and his wife with no kids they need someone to explain to them how much life insurance to buy?

Being good with money is the only absolute requirement for gaining wealth. If you are not good with money no amount of income will allow you to get to a healthy place financially. Most of the 'experts' people consult are either hawking them terrible products that perform SEVERAL percentage points below a basic low fee ETF with similar risk structure, or are simply telling them common sense things that they really should be able to figure out for themselves.

You do not need a degree in finance to have a basic understanding of how to invest in the stock market. You do not need an insurance license to figure out how much insurance will give you peace of mind and then purchase it in the most cost effective way possible. The idea that you do is a dangerous fallacy pushed on consumers by a systematically dishonest personal finance industry that thrives on failing to disclose how much they are charging for their services. Every single adult NEEDS to understand their own finances. Outsourcing your personal financial decisions over the long term is one of the most costly decisions that people routinely make.

Ahnuld has a pretty high hit rate because he's in the (relatively small) segment of the financial services industry that deserves to exist. At its most basic level Ahnuld is paid by his employers to be (very) good with money. They are also good with money which is how they can tell that he is good with money. His thread is aimed at a small audience of 2p2 members who have meaningful assets and (like nearly everyone) do not need your 'suitability study' to make a rational financial choice.

In short I think your entire industry is a cancer. You provide nothing of value, and in fact actively hurt your clients by convincing them that they need your help to make basic choices. I think that a significant % of your offerings are legal scams that bilk people who invest in them out of a good sized chunk of their retirement.

Disclaimer: When I talk about his industry I'm not talking about the entire finance sector, merely the retail finance section of it. The people who administrate your 401k plan at work are a good example of what I'm talking about. The people who actually work in the financial markets might also be rent seeking tumor people, but that is a much more difficult case to make. (and one I don't happen to agree with)

I would really need to dig more into why he thinks she will be part time in the future and ask her what she foresees well. How expensive is the house they would like to buy? Lots of questions before I could make an accurate assessment in this case. $1M on a stay at home mom with a 5 kids could make sense. Not so much if they have 1.

I have no clue in what capacity you work in finance but I do work in personal finance for people with pennies all the way up to multi billionaires. If you would like me to explain to you the horror stories of people who get "advice" from forums just like this and then go busto due to them not understanding what they are doing. The put on Jim Cramer, get hot stock picks from their neighbor or friend, sites like this...and boom.

For your etf example. Yes its great to just suggest etfs to accomplish many things. Does anyone talk about an exit strategy here? Does anyone explain how important proper asset allocation is? Risk tolerance? The importance of rebalancing any plan or suggestion? Lmao you know damn well the answer to those is no. The last thing some retiree or someone approaching retirement needs to do is to come on here and actually implement the advice I see on here.

There are definitely people in retail finance that are out to fleece others. I see it all the time. The fish get hooked and it costs them dearly. But at least they have some recourse if they get bad advice from a reputable company via arbitrage or court. If someone comes on here and takes this drivel to heart and loses everything, they are ****ed.

Alright everyone we're going to dissect this neat little piece of bull**** one piece at a time.

"I have no clue in what capacity you work in finance but I do work in personal finance for people with pennies all the way up to multi billionaires. "

This first sentence serves to establish this 'financial advisers' credibility. It sounds good but thinking about it for longer than 5 seconds is a mind blowing experience. If this particular guy had a single client who was worth more than 250M dollars that would pretty much be his only client. A management fee of 1% would amount to 2.5M dollars in cold hard cash. Any form of commission on individual transactions would net him many multiples of that 2.5M. Completely fantastical bull****.

"If you would like me to explain to you the horror stories of people who get "advice" from forums just like this and then go busto due to them not understanding what they are doing. The put on Jim Cramer, get hot stock picks from their neighbor or friend, sites like this...and boom."

In this section the adviser begins planting fear in his intended targets mind. He makes the world seem like a scary place where blue chip stocks are permanently within reach of the financial grim reaper. Never mind that any event that caused Berkshire Hathaway's stock to fall by 30+% would more less automatically result in much greater losses to anyone exposed to the market at all. Understanding your own level of financial expertise is really important. It's similar to knowing what you can and can't get away with physically, mentally, or sexually (kidding or not kidding?).

"For your etf example. Yes its great to just suggest etfs to accomplish many things. Does anyone talk about an exit strategy here?"

Here the adviser accidentally shows the seams of the trick bag a little bit. One of the first things that any adviser (and this they aren't actually wrong about for 95%+ of the population) tells people is that timing the market is impossible. They give a long spiel about how if you missed the 10 biggest up days of the last 10 years your total return would drop by some unholy amount. Now he's telling us that without him you'll have terrible timing. Your exit strategy with an ETF is when it makes sense. If you're getting older and you can no longer afford to lose money in the markets you sell your stocks and buy some bonds. Not that complicated. But in case that's too much just buy the Vanguard Target Retirement ETF that corresponds with when you plan to retire. Then forget about it until you retire.

"Risk tolerance? The importance of rebalancing any plan or suggestion? Lmao you know damn well the answer to those is no. The last thing some retiree or someone approaching retirement needs to do is to come on here and actually implement the advice I see on here. "

Yeah knowing that stocks have higher risk and higher reward over the long term (the mostly incorrect popular belief) is very complicated. There are low cost ETF's that already do a decent enough job of re balancing. This forum is the Business Finance and Investing section of Two Plus Two. We are a community of (now mostly ex) poker players who tend to be pretty savvy and entrepreneurial. Most of the threads that relate to investing in this thread are about professional trading. People who are terrible with money are generally not going to get enough of it together to lose it this way. Again this is just more fear mongering from someone who desperately wants you to believe that your personal finances are somehow the only part of being an adult that you can't take responsibility for.

"There are definitely people in retail finance that are out to fleece others. I see it all the time. The fish get hooked and it costs them dearly."

And yet he still thinks it's a good choice to have random people come into this den of vipers so that they can avoid the risk of what? I'll take the variance of actually owning something that I purchased for myself over risking being stolen from by some 'financial professional'.

"But at least they have some recourse if they get bad advice from a reputable company via arbitrage or court. If someone comes on here and takes this drivel to heart and loses everything, they are ****ed."

Lol no. Look into any time that some financial adviser actually overstepped the INCREDIBLY wide boundaries that they are allowed to operate inside legally. They generally did massive amounts of damage to clients and immediately declared bankruptcy. And I'm sorry but if you give me ****ty advice and I buy a fund that greatly underperforms while you get a big commission check... I get to take you to arbitration? Give me a ****ing break. It's not even grounds for arbitration. I waived any right to sue you for being a scumbag when I purchased your trashy front loaded mutual fund. It was in the fine print.


Cliffs: **** this guy and every other 'human being' with his job title.

EDIT: Obvs I've never bought a mutual fund lol.

My response to this guru. Lol, I dont work on commission and I dont compensated based on what my people do with their money. I hve chosen to work for a very well respected company. I do not make windfalls of money at all. In fact, my income is blue-collar. I could easily transition to a company like Ameriprise or EJ and probably make much more than I do now, but I think those business modes are extremely disgusting. If people were self-proclaimed Finance know-it-alls, just like you, they would not seek out the help they desperately need. And there are people who are much smarter than you and I who have professional money management for a reason. The fatal flaw with your argument is that you assume people want to manage their finances. But in reality, most do not. You also just make blatant statements about "selling stock ETFs and just buying some bonds." Lol okay, should someone just google "bond etfs" and pick the very first option? When do they do this- 5 years before retirement? Day 1 of retirement? Day 40 of retirement?

Other key piece you have completely missed is the part about recourse for getting advice. Two examples, someone here meets with an advisor from one of any of the huge companies. You pick. We will use Wells Fargo. Customer gets bad advice that is pretty atrocious.

Now a customer comes to 2+2 and tragically meets someone like yourself who is a self-proclaimed GOD of Finance who really talks very well and touts himself as someone who has done so much self-study that his advice means the most (much more than people who have gone to school for this, have been in the industry for 15 years, and have numerous designations and licenses). You make a suggestion that is actually atrocious given that person's financial situation (not in your mind- because how could you be wrong?), and the person blasts away your fail proof logic.

Both ideas go bust. Would you rather be the person who can bring litigation upon Wells Fargo via arbitration or sit and be mad you got advice from some scrub on 2+2?

If I was any person with significant Net Worth, I would chose the option where I have an out against the company. There is definitely good stuff here on 2+2, but most of it lacks talking with anybody about what their plans are with the money. People come here and give solutions to problems without actually discussing the root of the problem or why their solution makes sense to the person looking for guidance. The information I read here basically looks at a couple or a few variables, and then gets peppered with info overload and ideas that might make sense, but most that do not.

Also your point about this being a group of sophisticated entreprenuerial investors is laughable. That might actually describe 10% or less of the total volume of posters here. I just saw some advice this morning where a guy was looking for help with what to do with his life and some tard told him he should arbitrage US coin grading companies as a living.

Here is where you disect this post again to build credibility, try to insult me and my line of work when you have no clue what it is I actually do, etc. in fact your approach to put me on blast is exactly what you do to offer financial assistance to people, you think you know the problem and must make it known your reaponse is the best...when you really you dont know anything about me. Lol. Flame away tard boy.

Are you sure about that? Can you be more specific?


BoredSocial-You're tarding up this thread with all this hate about financial professionals and swinging your dong around like you know everything about everything, yet you have offered very little substance about life insurance specifically, which is what this thread is about. You just cryptically imply that any insurance (other than term) is a scam, without anything to back it up other than childish arguments like 'If I told you the secret reason why life insurance sucks you would be too devastated to handle it'. Textbook behavior for someone bluffing with no showdown value.

Also, you try to call others out for attempting to appeal to authority, yet you do that very thing itt. You claim that you're life/health licensed, yet no longer practice because you discovered that it is all a scam... why would you keep/maintain your licenses then?

A lot of what you say doesn't add up. But don't let any of that stop you from continuing to spew financial advice (re: EFT's and stocks..?) while condemning anyone else who would dare have the audacity to give financial advice.

Thread has gotten super derailed. Sorry OP.

This is all most people need to do well over a long period of time:

https://www.bogleheads.org/wiki/Bogl...ent_philosophy

"Contents
1 Develop a workable plan
2 Invest early and often
3 Never bear too much or too little risk
4 Diversify
5 Never try to time the market
6 Use index funds when possible
7 Keep costs low
8 Minimize taxes
9 Invest with simplicity
10 Stay the course"

Yeah I'm sure that a saver investing in a Vanguard target retirement fund that corresponds with his planned retirement date is going to end in ruin. People like you attempt to tell the rest of us that our very simple financial situation is actually incredibly complex. This fear mongering is a deliberate sales tactic designed to get us to give you a share of our retirement savings in exchange for peace of mind (that we would have for free if you'd never opened your lying mouth in the first place).

Does it bother you that someone is offering to completely replace you for 0.1800% per year?

As for what I know about you:

1) You're a liar. The first sentence of your last post was definitely a lie. This means that every other statement you make can be called into question without any further evidence.

2) You have 800+ individual customers. This could also be a lie because of 1) but more likely than not it means you're a somewhat successful retail financial adviser. This means that you make a living by either taking a % of your clients portfolio in exchange for giving them advise or by earning commission on products that they purchase. As long as the above mentioned Vanguard fund exists there is 0% chance that you can state that you are providing your customer with any value over a reasonable replacement. Even if you charge a flat fee your value is extremely dubious. The odds are very strong that every person who has ever done business with you is worse off for it.

3) I know that you lie to your customers about their recourse in the event of market losses. I know this because you've tried to make it seem as though 'he gave me bad advice' was grounds to get money back from a financial adviser. This is 100% hilariously false on every level. You are not liable for your clients losses in the market, even when you recommended that they buy something that goes to 0. From a liability perspective you have very little fiduciary responsibility for your clients indeed.

I gave the OP my view on his insurance situation... That he should use it to make sure that his family had a runway to restart their lives should he pass away. I also suggested that he should work to become financially literate now before he earns a huge amount of money and has an opportunity to screw it up.

The OP should start out with a decent amount of term (in his case 1-2M is actually justifiable) when his first kid is born and gradually reduce the amount of insurance he is carrying as his retirement account grows. When his net worth hits 1-2M he should probably phase out his insurance spend altogether unless his health is poor for some reason. (which can in certain cases make term life insurance a great bet)

At no point have I ever suggested that people who know very little about finance do anything other than find a low cost retirement date etf and contribute to it aggressively. That's all they have to do. Taking advantage of their lack of knowledge by filling their heads with visions of instant ruin is analogous to the people who claim that you can lose your house by playing one hand of online poker.

You absolutely can hurt yourself really badly by investing in stupid ways, but the statement 'I want to open a restaurant' is a much bigger threat to the financial well being of the average person than going out and learning about their own finances.

I have not lied in any of my posts. I have approximately 880 customers in my book. With combined assets of aporoximately $600 Million. I do not earn money based on AUM nor do I actively make investment decisions for these people. I get paid the same if I have $600M or $20000. And I dont work on commission. I know you think im lying again and your very opinionated/biased brain probably cant wrap itself around that but its true.

The wealthiest person I have has a net worth of about $22 billion. My conversation with this person was along the lines of "Call this guy to discuss the account" *click*, as approx $2M of his fortune is in my book. You are easily the biggest simpleton itt and probably in the board. I feel very sorry for any person who gets caught up in a pissing match like I have with you but I feel it is important that scumbag know-it-alls just like you are exposed.

Am I worried that a robot is going to replace me for .18%? Hahaha sadly I dont compete with a robot. Again your assumptions of others is so skewed and at best partially corect. You live in such a vaccuum with your opinions of financial professionals just like others have said. Best wishes to you, Ill follow your posts over the next few months to see what actual good advice you provide people, but I doubt there we be anything better than witless garbage upon a brief review of your posting history.

Also, the vanguard target etfs are great for people trying to diversify. You seem really hung up on those. Im sure you would give the same suggestion for someone with a $5M looking for diversification as you would someone with the same age, duration, and risk tolerance as someone with $10k though. Lol, you are such a guru.

I really enjoyed backreading BoredSocials shortlived blog in his profile, guys. Thankfully he hit the nail on the head that not a lot of people read it as his suggestions 4 years later besides his posts about CSCO have really spoken to his guru opinions.

lol at someone with a net worth of $22B having $2MM with some random financial advisor. There are only 4 Americans with a net worth of between $20B and $25B as of today's Bloomberg Billionaires Index. They are Phil Knight, Carl Icahn (don't think he's outsourcing much of him money to salaried guys in personal finance in $2MM blocks), Laurene Jobs (Steve's widow), and Steve Ballmer. I cannot imagine any of these people saying "yea, lets start up some small accounts with $2MM in them and see what happens...of course we should trust the salaried guy with 800+ other clients."

Yeah its kind of amazing to me that you managed to hunt down a blog that went dark 2 years ago. Or did you find the last vestigial remains of it on blogger? My actual blog was linked to by both Wall Street Journal and NYT bloggers and one of my posts was a feature post on Josh Brown's blog... But yeah obviously none of it panned out. Never mind that the stock I wrote up in the reformedbroker feature post is a 4 bagger to date. But yeah I'm a complete moron.

Also wow at claiming I'm the biggest tard in this thread when someone told the OP that he needed 4M in whole life insurance for himself and 2M for his wife.

I know right? I also love that he charges the same money to someone with 20k in assets as he charges someone with 2M under management. I don't think he realizes how stupid he sounds to those of us who actually deal with this kind of stuff on a semi regular basis.

You are good at your analysis. However this person didnt chose to have this account in my book. It kind of just happened by chance. And its not like every single one of these peoples accounts have no cieling in dollar thresholds.

Yes maybe the tard suggesting $4M and $2M beats you bored. Congrats, you found the anchor. Your analysis on ARO was def pro material, did all of your wall street friends hop on that advice too?

Remember: Always attack, never defend.

Is anyone else noticing that there's a man behind the curtain? Or the naked emperor walking down the street? Allow me to be the first to point and laugh.

I would really love to hear how 2 million of 22 billion ended up with you. That would be like me investing 20 bucks with you. It wouldn't even be worth keeping track of.

And Bored does not come off as a tard itt.

BoredSocial knows what he is talking about, the noobs arguing with him don't.

Both bored and chasin have said some pretty stupid stuff in the past 30 or so posts, but bored has chasin beat in who has said more nonsense.

There are way too many good and cheap FAs out there to recommend to "find a low cost retirement date etf and contribute to it aggressively". I know many on 2+2 are obsessed with cutting costs, but these are the same people that would suggest to a hotdog stand owner to stop supplying ketchup for his customers to cut his costs.

Recent history has suggested that broad market ETFs outperform many FAs, but pointing to this short history as proof to buy broad market ETFs assumes this trend continues. A lot of people used to say that real estate is a great investment because it always goes up too. This strategy also assumes you don't have some amateur buying and holding these ETFs and not making dumb decisions like trying to time the market.

So much of a FAs value is outside of managing investments. That includes preventing people from making dumb decisions, but also just being a second set of eyes to look over anything financial. IE: not buying $4M in insurance when some moron on 2+2 suggests that is how much you need.

I never said that those ETF's always perform well... I said that they can give you almost exactly what you would get from an above average financial adviser for a tiny tiny fraction of the cost.

Giving someone else even 1% of your account annually is a MASSIVE deal over the long run.

As for using FA's for financial advice. Wow. Just wow. How am I supposed to know whether my FA has any idea what he's talking about? How am I supposed to be sure he isn't some kind of scam artist (many FA's are to scammers what a certain type of girl in nightclubs are to prostitutes)?

EDIT: Let's not kid ourselves here... Bahbah is an FA. Of course he's going to think I'm dumb/an ******* for calling his entire industry a blight.