Who me??

Ok so I have had this blog for over a month now and really have not shared much about myself. So let me just tell you something I am not very proud of, it is March 31st and I still have not done my taxes. Yeah I know...

Anyway what I really would like to share with you is an experience I had with a financial advisor about a month ago which was disheartning to say the least. After asking around for quite some I finally got a good reference to someone from a colleague of mine who was referred by her husband's Business professor. The financial advisor is with a big, reputable company and my colleague seemed happy with her. My colleague even told me how much money they've invested with her which is less than what I would be starting out with.

The woman was very accessible and I went to her nice corner office in a nice part of town to meet with her. After commenting on how young I look and how smart I am to be concerned about saving for retirement she stunned me by whipping out a legal pad and asking for my address, income, and social security number!! Keep in mind she has told me nothing about herself, the funds she wanted me to invest in or anything else for that matter. I guess she figured my colleague already told me everything I need to know about her. WRONG! The rest of the meeting continued to go downhill with her telling me that "I clearly know a lot" implying she did not have to go over a lot of material. She never mentioned her fees, the fees of some of the products and failed to answer a lot of other questions I asked her. Now I am sure that this woman earned her nice office and I would have just figured that she was not bothering herself with answering my questions because I was young or was not investing as much as her other more wealthy clients. Thing is, my colleague invested way less than what I wanted to start with. So what could it be? I have more money to invest than my colleague, I am well read on investing, it seems like I would be a decent client. This made me think about it for a few days thereafter and the only thing I could think of is that my colleague who is a few years older than I am is a married woman and I am not. Do married people seem like more stable clients than single people? I don't know, but finding a good financial advisor sure is hard.