I thought I might publish my initial letter to my financial planner so you can see why I decided to remove my money from my WRAP Account and put it in cash. I gave my retirement nest egg money to my financial planner in November 2006.

By about May of 2007 I was getting concerned about how it was being managed. The returns were not good and as time went on I became very nervous about the stock market. After having managed my own retirement funds for the previous ten years I didn’t want to become paranoid about not being in control.

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The Expo was well attended but many Baby Boomers were there to see the Winnebago campervans and visit the retirement village stands. I attended all the Financial Seminars which were not well attended at all.

The seminars ran all day. Here is a quick run-down of the ones I liked the best along with some comments by me.

Clearview Retirement Solutions

Here the key thing for me was the financial planners are paid a salary. That means no commissions before or after the sale. The presentation was very informative and covered much of the new legislation about retirement, super contributions and taxation and tax free withdrawal after 60.

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Its official! Most mutual fund managers do not have the confidence to invest their own money in the mutual funds they manage. Are you surprised? I’m not.

I have always maintained many of them use your money to find market bottoms, pump and dump stocks just before bonus time and in general use the fund to manipulate the markets.

Let me qualify that by saying there are probably some ethical fund managers out there, but the majority according to this report wouldn’t touch the mutual funds they manage with a ten foot pole.

In an article called “No skin in the Game” by Chuck Jaffe on MarketWatch he says a Morningstar Inc study found that, Read the rest of this entry »

The more I read about the need to have investments in the stock market in retirement regardless of the market volatility the more I realise this is fund managers trying to get your money just to gamble. You need to remember they get paid on the size of the funds under management NOT the returns they create for you or the losses they minimise for you.

Since the stock market eventually recovers they can keep wasting your hard earned money trying to time the market until it eventually turns bullish. That’s when they will be right and they’ll tell you how smart you were to buy and hold through the bad times. They forget that you might now need to recover 10, 20, 30% of your capital they lost trading it in a down market. Read the rest of this entry »

I was doing some research today for some future posts and came across an article that talked about the subprime mortgage crisis. It was talking about the fact that mortgages do not necessarily want to walk away from their mortgage. They just can’t find out who to talk to about it.

Due to the subprime mess their mortgage is now owned by several hundred investors who could be anywhere in the world. So there is no chance of them ever meeting the mortgage owners. Can you imagine how frustrating that might be? They cannot go and see the local bank manager to ask for some breathing space like we could in days gone by.

I’ve always had this view that once a transaction is even once removed from the two people who conduct it, simple problems may become impossible to resolve and often any sense of personal responsibility is lost too.

Right now many of us have our retirement money invested with people we have never seen and never met. There is a complete separation between us, our money and the person who is supposedly looking after it for us. We even forget about it ourselves. Read the rest of this entry »

How does a Baby Boomer find a good financial planner? This is an important question and should not be taken lightly because you may have a relationship with them for 30 years or more. So you need to do your due diligence on anyone you select.

There are plenty of Internet articles on selecting a financial planner but many of them focus on the qualifications and longevity of the financial planner and are written by the financial planning industry themselves.

I believe you have to interview them as if you will be their employer which in fact you will be for those 30 years.

You also need to get away from thinking in terms of a local financial planner. If you find a local one who qualifies then that is great. But I think you need to look nationally for the best one you can find. Try some on this list as a start.

Wealth Manager List

Or look at the Top 100 Wealth Manger List

You need to meet and talk with them first and ask them all the routine questions and some awkward questions like the ones I listed in my

10 Questions Baby Boomers should ask their Financial Advisors Now!

You must not be embarrassed about putting them on the spot. This is your money and your life. Here is an example of my questions.

The planner wanted to charge me $2,800.00 to put a portfolio together for me and then on-going fees of about $7,000.00 a year for putting all my money in Index Funds. I wanted the fees justified for an Index Fund which supposedly did little trading. But I think this was the cruncher. Read the rest of this entry »

Many in the financial planning industry have what is called the 3-6-9 method for calculating a Baby Boomers retirement income. What do the numbers mean? They assume there is 3% inflation, 6% return on fixed interest and 9% return on equities.

They plug these bogus numbers into their models and add a bit of risk profiling, asset allocation and some diversification and then present it to Baby Boomers as a matter of fact. This is all voodoo financial planning using assumed numbers.

It is explained very well in three videos I think you should see by Dr Larry Parks. I am not a gloom and doom merchant, just a realist. I want to use real historical numbers in the absence of future actual numbers, not bogus averages. See my FREE Report posted here two days ago called What if You Retired in 2000?

Dr Larry Parks explains many things besides these bogus number in his videos. On the third video he talks about the incredible growth in derivatives and tells us Bank of America, CitiBank and J P Morgan held the majority of them in the USA. What makes this important is the video was created before the sub prime crisis surfaced as far as I can tell from some of the charts he uses.

Anyway have a look and please comment on them in this post if you wish to do so.

I’ll take you to the videos on You Tube rather than load them here:

The Attack On Retirement Savings Pt. 1

The Attack On Retirement Savings Pt. 2

The Attack On Retirement Savings Pt. 3

I find much of what Dr Parks says very hard to take but I believe we need to consider it. He appears to have researched his subject well and even if we don’t agree with it we should respect what he is telling us.

You can read more on Dr Larry Parks on his web site FAME.

Regardless of what you think about Dr Larry parks and his videos make sure your financial planner does not use the 3-6-9 method for your retirement planning.

Finding any financial planner who understands the needs of Baby Boomers in retirement is difficult. I spend several hours a day researching the Internet for information I can disseminate on my Blog.

Sometimes I come across a financial planner’s blog or website that meets the standards of what a financial planner should be all about when looking after our Nest Eggs.

The site is McKinney Avenue Capital. Here is a brief overview of why I think Matt McCracken meets the requirements Baby Boomers in retirement need of a financial planner.

First you should read the About McKinney Avenue Capital page to get an understanding of Matt’s background and value system. Here is just a sample for the About page” Read the rest of this entry »