hOW TO chOOSE AN EXPERT AdvISERing.” I don’t buy that. You don’t care about everybody else losing money;
you care about your own money and your retirement. A good adviser
who was paying attention to what was happening in the U.S. economy
should have seen it coming. After all, it is the adviser’s job to see it com-
ing. When the stock market is growing, it’s very easy for an adviser to
make his clients’ money; but making your clients money even when the
stock market is going down is what separates the professionals from the
amateurs.
(5) ARe YoU oPen to ChAnge? hoW Do YoU
keeP UP on neW stRAtegIes?There are advisers out there who still follow strategies that worked very
well back in the 1980s and ’90s. Unfortunately, the economy we’re in
now is not the ’80s or ’90s, and it’s not going to be that way again
anytime soon. Find out what your adviser is doing to stay abreast of the
changes that are going on in the industry and economy. Are they well-
versed, or do they use a cookie-cutter approach?
Some advisers are trained to do only mutual funds all the time, or maybe
they take the approach that life insurance is best all the time. It might
be good for them, if they only need to know one product or two prod-
ucts. They can talk about them and sound well educated, but that’s not
going to be good enough. They have to recognize and adapt to change.
If an adviser hasn’t changed his approach in the past three to five years,
chances are he is going to lose a lot of clients, or a lot of those clients are
going to struggle during retirement.
PRoteCtIng YoURselF FRoM
the next BeRnIe MADoFF“So how do we know you’re not another Bernie Madoff?” people have
sometimes asked me. Others, less blunt, just want to know: “How do
I protect myself from a Bernie Madoff or a Ponzi scheme? How do I
protect myself from getting ripped off?”
One layer of protection is to work with a member of the National Ethics
Association. Another way you can protect yourself is to not work with
advisers who take custody of your funds. If we use Bernie Madoff as
an example, he owned the company that held the assets. People wrote
personal checks made out to him and asked him to invest that money. He