Free Advice is Sometimes Not Worth the Price

Julie Shea on The Spectator  warns consumers to beware of free advice from banks and Wall Street as they are there to purely make profit. “When we are in these warm, welcoming banks we forget the mammoth towers on Bay Street housing these corporations that make hundreds of millions in profits and pay their CEOs tens of millions of dollars. Profit is their bottom line. When advisers are compensated to sell and not paid a fee to provide advice, people can sometimes be sold things that don’t necessarily fit into their overall plan or that they don’t even understand… The moral of this story is that the compensation structure of our financial services industry, which pays advisers to sell and not to give advice, creates an unavoidable bias. Consumers need to take time to educate themselves and get second opinions so they can determine whether the free advice that they are receiving is worth the price they are paying.” (thespec.com)