Deceived for Commission

Sounds like my wife’s ex financial planner. I warned her after meeting him once before she gave him her money but she trusted him because her dad uses him (btw her dad has less than 1% of his net worth with this guy). Took me five years of doing yearly reviews with her to finally pull the money and put in index funds.

They put her in an annuity, impossible to liquidate private reits and my favorite was summer of 2020 after qe was in full force they put a third of her money in bonds. The underperformance was insane. Had it just been 10% worse than an index fund I’d be so happy.

I had set aside some money to invest into stocks. So opened an account with Internaxx bank and took out a cheap subscription under a special offer with the Porter Stansberry tipping sheet.

It was around 2010 and I did remarkably well, quickly building up a nice little portfolio and collecting dividends and watching as the values increased. What could go wrong? I had a phone call from some broker in the UK who specialised in pre IPO stocks and floatations so listened and the guy explained how using CFD’s you could leverage up your position and take control of a much bigger slice of the action and make a huge amount of money…….. I think some rich guy like Warren Buffet once said if you do not fully understand what you are investing in just give it a miss. So a new account was opened and I started off making my fortune.

Well no, I ended up with a black hole which had these things called margin calls which gobbled up cash like there was no tomorrow. I quickly realised that this was not working and bailed out pretty quickly but then got into leveraged trading on gold……… It was an interesting 6 months and taught me that I was not really understanding what was going on and I would never cut it as a trader so there was something positive at least.

A financial services guy told a lunch group that it made no difference whether people donated appreciated stock directly to a charity or sold it and donated the proceeds to charity. He claimed that, either way, “you still got the charitable deduction. ”While this is true, he completely ignored the capital gains tax that would be triggered when the person (rather than the charity) sold the appreciated stock. He could not comprehend that a direct donation of the appreciated stock to charity could save the donor from having to pay tax on that capital gain.

He was totally obsessed with the relatively minor charitable deduction on their tax return. I thought this was horrible advice and a disservice to anyone who followed his financial advice.