Today I got a courtesy call from our brokerage company, who has assigned a new financial advisor to my account.  He asked me about our family’s financial strategies, and if we had anything we’d like him to look into.  I said yes…I currently have some money in a mutual fund that I would be interested in moving to an index fund.  But he balked at that, saying that he is compensated for getting me into front-end loaded mutual funds, and that he is not compensated for getting me into no-load funds (like index funds), so he didn’t want to spend time doing that for me. 

So basically, he doesn’t want to advise me to do things that don’t make him more money.  I questioned him on that.  I said I’ve got financial goals for my family, and you have goals as an adviser that’s paid whenever I make trades, and those two goals don’t always match up.  So when do I call you?  His answer was again, call me when you want me to do something that makes me money. 

His advice doesn’t seem very helpful to me.  One good thing that came up was the fact that our family last did a detailed long-term financial plan in 2002 (so long ago, this blog doesn’t even go back that far!).  That was a newly married Jerry and Sara, living in Santa Fe, with no kids and living off a corporate expense account.  I hardly remember those people.  So it’s probably time to revise the financial plan.  The advisor said he’d be happy to help us with that…for $400. 

This was a pretty disappointing call from this company.  When we first started with them in 2002, we really like our advisor.  She listened to us, and helped us to achieve our goals.  About a year ago, we received a neat little workbook from them that again helped us define our goals and ways to achieve them.  Now this guy comes along, and now what I hear is, “your goals are less important to me than my commission.” 

Well guess what, you’re brokerage is about to lose our business completely.  So what’s THAT going to do to your commission?