The problem with financial advice – Part I

Now, I’m just some semi-anonymous blogger, so what do I know, right?

So, sometimes it’s nice if I can point you to others who share my opinions on controversial financial matters [AJC: I write almost exclusively about controversial financial matters … why write something that’s already in 5,000 other blogs, therefore, has a 99.9999% chance of being wrong?!].

For example, my opinion on financial advisors is that they are a waste of money.

But, Dan Ariely, a behavioral economist and author of two best-sellers, including Predictably Irrational, agrees:

From a behavioral economics point of view, the field of financial advice is quite strange and not very useful. For the most part, professional financial services rely on clients’ answers to two questions:

  • How much of your current salary will you need in retirement?
  • What is your risk attitude on a seven-point scale?

From my perspective, these are remarkably useless questions — but we’ll get to that in a minute. First, let’s think about the financial advisor’s business model. An advisor will optimize your portfolio based on the answers to these two questions. For this service, the advisor typically will take one percent of assets under management – and he will get this every year!

I agree with Dan when he says:

Not to be offensive, but I think that a simple algorithm can do this, and probably with fewer errors. Moving money around from stocks to bonds or vice versa is just not something for which we should pay one percent of assets under management.

Now, this is targeted at funds managers (both retail and institutional) as well as those who charge fees and/or commissions to prepare similar financial advice.

Remember, funds tend to fall short of the market in performance over time, by about how much they charge in fees …

Lesson: if you really want to short-change your financial future by investing in funds and over-diversifying (two sure ways to die broke), do what Warren Buffett suggests and invest in super-low cost Index Funds:

A very low-cost index is going to beat a majority of the amateur-managed money or professionally-managed money.

In the next part of this special three part series, I will show you how most people short-change their retirement by 60%,

 

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5 thoughts on “The problem with financial advice – Part I

  1. Pingback: The problem with financial advice – Part II- 7million7years

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