How to get yourself noticed by a Financial Advisor, by Amanda

First thing, you need to have a capital management firm managing the investments of your company.  Secondly, you’ll need to have a 401(k) meeting with your fellow investment disgruntled co-workers and a couple of the firms financial advisors.  Third, you need to raise hell because you’re unhappy you’re paying them more than the last firm and they’re losing your money as well as not letting you see your stocks.  Get an unsatisfying answer, raise a little more hell and then let it simmer and sink in with your co-workers.  (Not that they weren’t thinking about it already…)

Note:  With the old firm, we would lose little snippets of money in the down times but not like this and this “down time” isn’t nearly as bad as the last one.

One of my irritations is that they’re being non truthful.  Telling us very little by waltzing around questions, keeping us in the dark and downright fibbing.  At least they’re not making up new words while they do it.  Another is that we’re paying them more and getting much less… less service, less gain (in fact no gain) and we have much less control over our money than we had before.  They make it look so pretty on paper… but honestly, I don’t have a lot of money and I’d like to keep the little that I do have.  To hell with their looking good.

Of course, we DO have the option to Self Direct at an additional fee of $70 administrative fee per quarter on top of what we already pay them… plus whatever fees to buy or sell stocks and other fees.  Correct me if I’m wrong but, if I’m doing all the work… why am I paying extra?  Shouldn’t I be paying them much LESS???   That doesn’t add up.

Well, at least they showed us our stocks (sort of) this time.

One of the Financial Advisors stopped me in the hallway to give me his card and explain it to me some more why we can’t see what our money is doing.  I don’t buy it.  Not one word.  He brought in accounting aspects, variables… whatnot.  I don’t see how they couldn’t have a spreadsheet or Access database with our non-variables in it and just update the variables.  I don’t know about everybody else but I know that most of us have paychecks that are exactly the same every two weeks.  We debated over costs of creating individual reports and whatnot, he seems to think it would cost a lot of money, I seem to remember creating a pretty complex set of spreadsheets that took maybe an hour to complete and it does SOOOOO bloody MUCH with variables and non-variables that you’d think it was a program.  And I’m not even that great at math!!!

Meanwhile, I stirred up one hell of a wasps nest back in installation.  The everyone is right there with me.  They've been talking about it today.

I've been writing one hell of an email.  Diplomatic, civil and direct.  Just the kind of thing that gets stuff done.