My wife and I are moving our retirement accounts from one bank to another. Once we get the accounts set up at the new bank, we want to invest the money — nothing fancy, just standard retirement account stuff. Our previous bank let us choose some pre-made options based on risk tolerance, and we want to do something like that again, like a target retirement date fund.
But I can’t see any way on the bank’s website to actually invest the money in our retirement accounts. I call the bank and ask how to find that option.
Representative: “Oh, no, we don’t put that option on our website. We want everyone to come in and talk to us first, you know, so that we can get a sense of your financial situation and give you some advice with anything you need.”
Okay, sure. We agree to stop by the bank and make an appointment to come in on a Saturday morning. When we arrive, we’re led to a little office where [Representative] tells us that he’s going to run through a series of questions to determine how we might best invest our savings.
The questions are normal enough — salaries, debts, etc. — but they go on for a long, long time. My wife is four months pregnant, and she’s at the point where it’s painful for her to sit in one place for too long. This meeting lasts for almost three hours, blowing right past lunchtime, so toward the end, we’re also extremely hungry. But we think that if we can just make it through whatever this meeting is, we’ll be able to invest the savings and move on with our lives.
But no! The meeting ends, and that option is never discussed.
Me: “So, now that we’ve done this, how can we invest the money in our retirement accounts?”
Representative: “Oh, no, that’s not something we’d do now. We need to have another meeting to continue the conversation and really understand what kind of parameters are best for you.”
We agree to another meeting because we’re just desperate to get out of there. (I know, we’re fools.) The second meeting comes around, and again, we’re constantly under the (foolish) impression that we’re about five minutes away from the meeting ending and us having the answer we want.
But there’s another person who joins the second meeting: [Financial Advisor]. He introduces himself and starts singing his own praises, basically telling us how lucky we are to have his financial advice. (Side note: during the meeting, he gives us one specific piece of advice, telling me that I really should sell a certain stock — the only stock I own — because the CEO of the company is in poor health, and if the CEO dies, my stock will crash. I ended up separately taking his advice. The CEO did indeed die soon, and the stock soared.)
Throughout this meeting, I’m getting more and more upset that we’ve been tricked into what are clearly long-form thinly-veiled advertisements for [Financial Advisor]’s services. We reach the end of another multi-hour meeting, and again, when I ask how we can invest the money in our retirement accounts, he says he’ll call me to follow up.
At this point, I’m done with this guy. (I know, I should have been done with him much earlier.) He calls a few days later, and I ask him point-blank how to invest our money.
Financial Advisor: “That’s a great question! That’s the kind of thing we can discuss at our next meeting.”
Nope. I tell the guy — still politely — that we are not interested in paying for his advisory services, we never wanted such services, and we simply want to make our own choices about what to invest in.
Financial Advisor: “I wouldn’t feel comfortable telling you how to do that because that’s the purpose of our meetings. The advice I’d give you as your financial advisor—”
Me: “Please just tell me: is there a way I can simply choose what to invest in and have the bank invest in it?”
Financial Advisor: “No.”
Me: “Then if that’s something I want to do, you’re saying I need to use a different bank.”
Financial Advisor: “Well… that’s technically true, but I really recommend—”
Me: “Got it. Thanks for your help.”
I immediately withdraw all of our money, open an account with a different bank, and select what to invest it in. The process of selecting investments takes all of three minutes.
But the story isn’t over! When I check my account statement from the first bank, I see that they’ve charged me $225 as a processing fee for terminating the accounts. I call the bank and talk to the initial representative, explaining why we’re dissatisfied and why I’d like my $225 refunded.
Representative: “Sir, you came to us. You wanted financial advice.”
Me: “No, I didn’t. I wanted to choose what to invest in, and that’s it. [Financial Advisor] kept trying to market his services to us, and we didn’t want them.”
Representative: “That’s not the way I remember it.”
We went back and forth a bunch, and he kept refusing to refund the charges. It was maddening.
Finally, I was able to extract from him the email address of some higher-up to whom I could make a complaint. I wrote a long letter detailing all of this, and a few weeks later, I got a very apologetic phone call and a refund of $225. Phew.
