Personal Investment Adviser

Back in 2006 I consolidated all my ragtag investments under the Fidelity umbrella. I had IRA’s with both GM and Delphi that I had to keep separate while I was working. Now that I am retired and Fidelity was handling my pension, I was allowed to merge everything together. The past few years have not been pretty by any means investment wise, but I like to think I weathered out the mess fairly well.

Fidelity has been pestering me to take advantage of this new “personalized” brokerage service they are offering. I really don’t pay enough attention to how my accounts are doing. I’m not planning on having to access any of these accounts for a long time. I’m not one to constantly switch money around between accounts… I pretty much “buy and hold”.

I spoke with a very pleasant representative this morning. She took my pertinent information to transfer to the “experts” the next level up who I was assured would look over my account and make recommendations. Basically, I’m too heavy into large cap funds. I was told that I really should get more invested into more mid and small caps.

I was told to expect an e-mail from the experts later on in the day. Please, I’m not that stupid; I know they will just feed my information into a computer.

When I got home from working out at the “Y” sure enough there was the E-mail with my information. I was anxious to see what funds I was recommended. To my shock, they had my portfolio doing a total turn around. Researching this more I found they were taking me out of my best performing funds with 4 and 5 star ratings from Morningstar. They had me instead going into funds with only two and three stars.

Back in the spring of 1997 my life was in turmoil. It makes my “tits itch” to just think about all I went through. I let this investment consultant who did workshops at a retirement clinic at work do some moves with my investments. When I realized what happened I never had such blind trust again concerning my money. He was the only one to profit from the deal on the hefty commissions he got.

The same warning bells went off the more I investigated this “personalized service”. Hidden away was “Your estimated net annual advisory fee: 0.88%.” My math skills have never been stellar, but calculators make finding percentages easy. Multiplying the investment amount by .88 and then dividing by 100 gave me a figure with too many zeros! I don’t need to be spending that kind of money to just have somebody hold my hand.

This representative was very personable, but she has to be to lure people like me into parting with money. It did not work this time… this boy aint signing up for NOTHING!

Something good did come out of this though, it forced me to take a look at my portfolio and give me ideas to rebalance it some. That I can do on my own without running up big fees!