yet another life experience


typing on the laptop at the coffee table, looked down and ARGH!

As part of our attempts to be more grown up, one of the projects this year was to consult a financial adviser.

When we moved our mortgage to a new bank at the end of last year, a personal banker came with the package. He has been pretty excellent in making the transition absolutely seamless and has been great to work with. When we mentioned that we had been considering getting some financial advice and he said he’d organise a meeting with one of the bank’s financial advisers if we were interested – which we were.

However, there have been a number of scandals recently where planners employed by the big banks have completely mis-managed their clients funds – leaving those clients out hundreds of thousands of dollars. So we went into this meeting with eyes very wide open and a healthy suspicion.

We (well, to be fair, mostly Don) put in a lot of effort into preparation for this meeting, clearly defining our goals and working out what we’d want our retirement to look like – even down to developing a retirement budget.

In summary, the goals are:
* minimise our tax (Don always has a large tax bill at the end of the year)
* retire between 60 and 65 (everyone over 60 at SML has kind of lost the plot. I do not want to be that person!)
* have the mortgage paid off by retirement
* have $x in superannuation by retirement

Armed with all of this we went into our preliminary meeting. We talked for about almost two hours and agreed to pay a not insignificant sum for a comprehensive plan.

A few weeks later and it was time to meet to discuss the results.

And there was no plan – comprehensive or otherwise. Nothing even remotely resembling a plan. We were presented with some options for investing our superannuation (retirement savings), but mostly were pitched a bunch of ridiculously gold-plated insurance products – so gold-plated that it would take Don’s entire superannuation contributions (9.5% of his salary) to pay the premiums!

There was not even basic projection for where we would be at retirement if we followed this advice. When we asked about how our goals fit into this, we were told they were not achievable. Well, of course they wouldn’t be if all of our retirement savings went on insurance premiums. Unkind people might suggest the planner was more interested in his hefty insurance sales commission than anything else. There was also nothing about what we would need to do/change to achieve our goals or … anything.

Needless to say we were rather displeased and extremely disappointed, but maintained the veneer of civility and professionalism. And really, the dude was a bit of a patronising dick (we were indeed fortunate that he was deigning to deal with us, because he generally dealt with much larger portfolios – which he enthusiastically reminded us on a couple of occasions). Any time we asked a specific question, he would pretty much brush it off and displayed a singular lack of knowledge about several issues .

We reluctantly chalked the cost up to a learning experience. But fortunately when Don gave our feedback to our personal banker (who was at the meeting), he was insistent that we not pay anything and agreed that it did not cover anything we had expected.

Nevertheless, despite this very dire experience, we’re meeting with an independent planner on Friday. If that ends no better, we’re going to have to take this into our own hands.

8 thoughts on “yet another life experience

  1. What an awful experience, and total dick of a planner. I suspect we will be working until we are 103 as no retirement savings are even possible, super is almost non-existent and the babies in my house keep multiplying!

    • Oh, words can’t describe the smarminess!

      Yeah, we’re really behind the eight ball with super too and madly trying to catch up. Retirement is scary stuff – especially as you wonder where these jobs at 70 are actually supposed to come from! Who is going to employ a 70 year old? Or even a 60 year old?

    • She loves to lay on her back and show her little vampire teeth out – fortunately she isn’t the attacking one. The other more than makes up for it – she has a long standing war against white socks on feet.

    • I think is definitely worth considering – what we got was nothing like what was offered in their glossy brochure (or even what was promised on the cover documentation of what they delivered).

      Though realistically I think we’ll just wash our hands of it all.

  2. It’s very annoying when you finally do something after a long time of procrastinating and it doesn’t work out as you expect. I hope the next planner is more helpful.

    • Oh definitely annoying. We’re kind of zen about it now and will definitely use the experience for the next meeting.

      Though I suspect he’ll try and flog insurance to us as well (seems to be an industry thing), but hopefully there will be a little more substance!

      If there isn’t anything better we’ll reassess. Not something we really want to take on ourselves, but it may well be that we have to. Glad we didn’t put it off much longer!

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