How advisors shackle wavering clients (think annuities)
August 6, 2014 by Gil Weinreich, ThinkAdvisor
Some advisor-client relationship contracts include termination fees — even steep ones — for clients seeking to take their assets elsewhere, but that’s not the only method advisors use to hold on to unhappy clients.
The ethically questionable practice of a client termination fees got wide attention through Jason Zweig’s most recent column in the weekend Wall Street Journal,which noted that even “fiduciary” advisors imposed duties as high as 1% of the account for clients exiting within a year of the account opening.
Dave Dickinson, co-founder of FireMyAdvisor, a relatively new firm that seeks to facilitate advisor-client divorces and shepherd disgruntled clients into the care of fiduciary advisors, says such termination fees — especially such steep ones — are rare. Click here to read…
