Last week, I got into a prolonged, disagreeable phone conversation about a mutual client with what I consider to be the lowest form of 'financial advisor' on the planet: A career life insurance agent. Here's my open letter to him:
What gives you the right to call yourself a financial advisor? You have one strategy -- convince everyone that their financial situation can be helped with some type of life insurance product, including (and especially) variable and indexed annuities. Isn't it interesting that these these products generate big commission payments to you? Never mind that your client pays well over 2% and probably closer to 3% of their 'invested' money every year in expenses to help pay those commissions, a fact you don't audibly disclose. Never mind that you have little or no expertise in retirement, investment, or tax planning. Never mind that you don't live by a fiduciary standard, you live by making your insurance company quotas. You either don't know, or don't care, that not everybody needs life insurance. In fact, you want people to believe that it's perfectly normal to buy enough life insurance to cover all the income they might make in the future -- a 'future value' approach that makes absolutely no sense, and profits nobody except you and your company. You are a self-serving loser, and you suck.
This letter doesn't apply to every career insurance agent, just most of them. As a certified financial planner, I do everything in my power not to be closely associated with them. Actually, that's a financial strategy that would help everyone!
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