Firms in the investment advising industry are changing their tunes a bit lately. When times were “good” they spent millions on advertising trying to convince you that you’d be wealthy beyond your imagination. “Just wait until you retire and wow! what a great life you’ll have sailing on your yacht all day. “
Now that consumers have been through a bit of a rough patch have you noticed that more and more commercials from investment firms have toned themselves down? Now they are telling you that they’ll make it easy to convert the 401(k) from your lost job into an IRA, or that they’ll help you plan a much more reasonable retirement so that at least you’ll be comfortable.
So the message from them seems to be that during times when they want to sell unreasonable expectations that your $4,000 investment in your IRA this year will become $1,000,000 in just 15 years, they’ll be there to help you believe that. And during times when you have unreasonable fears that you can’t accomplish anything financially, they’ll be there to help you at least with the paperwork when you lose your job.
Barf. Instead, why don’t you choose to work with someone who is going to send you a consistent message? Personally, I like the one where we say that we’re going to know you well enough to understand what you want and to be courageous enough to tell you the truth about you getting there. That used to be rather unpopular when we told people to tone down their expectations as their portfolios kept jumping up. But we kept saying it and believing it and working at it. And now it is rather unpopular to tell people that the personal pursuit of financial happiness is possible. But we’re going to keep saying it and believing it and working at it.
