Or am I misunderstanding and this isn’t considered a rollover?

Funny enough, even the low commission stuff adds up a lot faster over time if you get a good enough reputation. I may only make a bit off of one person in a visit, but if I provide good service and take care of them… Well, repeat customers trump single good sales. Too bad these advisors don’t understand that.

Our guy is great – but then he has also switched companies 3 time in the last 8 years because the firms he worked for started using quotas to tell him how much he needed to sell. He is now with a group of other CFPs who banded together and formed their own company to fight this very issue.

Investment Advisors and Financial Advisors are usually just salesmen with confusing titles. Look for a fee for service Certified Financial Planner if you want advice and are willing to pay for it. Worth every penny!

Part of my job is to refer clients to financial advisers (since I don’t have the required licenses to sell investments), we’re very careful who we recommend. If you want to find someone good, ask for a referral from another professional you trust – such as a CPA or attorney. They usually won’t risk damaging their reputation by recommending someone shady.

Yeah, that was pretty much the worst possibly example of a financial planner you could possibly imagine. It is so sad to know that people like that are advising others on what to do with the money that is supposed to be their lifeline in later years…

As so many people stated in their comments, know your financial stuff and instead of going to a financial advisor, try a Investment Advisor.

The whole relationship is established with the fact that I will never buy anything from you except help and advice.

I have some money in a small IRA thru a vendor. Last year, the vendor has changed some of its direction in how they provide service. It had been more hands off, but now they want to work with each investor as to specific money goals. It has been a comedy of errors trying to get together to review my financial situation and our family’s goals. Something always seems to come up for me or him at the 11th hour and its been rescheduled about 6 times!

Financial Advisors operate in a perpetual conflict of interest. The products that make the most money for themselves are the ones that provide the least benefit to their clients. They cannot possibly provide objective advice in your best interest when their entire compensation structure encourages them to promote the most expensive products.

Here’s another anecdote: Shortly after we got married, my wife and I got a phone call from a “financial advisor.” We knew we needed to save for retirement, so we agreed to meet with him. He showed us some mutual funds that were guaranteed to always be worth no less than the sum of our contributions, although they’d grow with the market if the market happened to rise. They’re called “segregated” mutual funds. It sounded fantastic! Mutual funds that are always worth at least what we’ve put it? Where do I sign up! Why doesn’t EVERYBODY buy these funds?

Years later, when I learned more about investing, I discovered what an MER is. Out of curiousity, I decided to check the MER of our “segregated” funds. The MER was 3.75%. For those who don’t know, that’s outrageously high, and a total ripoff.

I further learned that “segregated” funds are great for older people, closing in on retirement, with low risk tolerances. For them, preservation of capital is key. But my wife and I were 25, and explicitly said our risk tolerance was high. This guy was simply harvesting massive fees off a couple naive young professionals. We ditched him.

Don’t trust people with an obvious conflict of interest, particularly when money is involved. Nobody cars more about your money than you do. A Financial Advisor’s primary motivation is to make HIMSELF richer, not you.