Wolves of Wall Street, Part 2: How to Spot a Fake Fiduciary

Speaker A: Welcome back to the Retirement Fiduciary Podcast. A place where we have, uh, authentic, no BS discussions about retirement planning, investment strategies and wealth management. Whether you're approaching retirement or if you've already made work optional, this show is for you. Now here's your host, Adam Koch, president portfolio manager and senior financial advisor at Libertas wealth management group@libertas wealth.com.

Speaker B: all right, what's going on, everybody? Thank you so much for joining us again today for part two two of exposing the Wolves of Wall Street. A peek behind the curtain as we unmask the dark side of investing. I didn't have any really good dark music to put behind that, but maybe I should have. But anyway, let's just go through our housekeeping items. As always, if this is your first time listening or watching. Thank you so much for joining us. The Retirement Fiduciary Podcast is an authentic educational show aimed at providing honest, candid, fiduciary driven insights for individuals and couples all over the country. The the Retirement Fiduciary Podcast. We cut through the noise to deliver no nonsense advice and expert knowledge to help make work optional someday and live the lifestyle you've always wanted. All right, now let's jump into the material here. This is like I said, part two of exposing the wolves of Wall street. And I am going to use the same quote as we used last week or two weeks ago, I should say, which is Martha Beck again, author, life coach, speaker. She said, how you do anything is how you do everything. And, uh, it's. I just think that unfortunately there's bad apples out there. And I've always told people who ask, what's my why? Why do I do this? Why are we still taking clients on considering we have such a successful company? And the answer is we like saving people. I like saving people from bad advice, or at least less than perfect advice. Not to say we're perfect. There's no such thing as perfect. Our why here is helping the public get the best possible, most transparent, fiduciary driven advice out there and saving them from potential bad advice. So I think how you do anything is how you do everything. And, uh, the way we give advice here at our office is we pretend as if everything is going to be on tomorrow's front page. Uh, and that's how you do it, right? I could tell you stories, but that's not what we're doing today. Today we're talking part two of, uh, the Wolves of Wall Street. So first one here that we're going to talk about today is insurance agents that pose as, as wealth managers. What I mean by this is I'm not talking about somebody who works for an insurance company who legitimately does financial planning. They might offer you mutual funds and maybe even individual stocks. I've never seen it before, but maybe they do. Maybe they use ETFs. Again, never seen it before, but perhaps some of them do offer some solutions based advice. But we're not talking about those kinds of people. We're talking about insurance agents that oftentimes you'll see them doing seminars, dinner seminars. And there's nothing wrong with doing dinner seminars, by the way. We did them here at our office for 10 years. I think we probably did an easy 140 to 150 dinner seminars between 2007 and 2017. And the reason we stopped was because it seemed like it was getting too saturated. It seemed like there was way too many people out there doing them, which meant, uh, the attendance was getting smaller because the attendance was being spread out among several different advisors, financial advisors, financial planners, insurance agents. And there was just too much of it going on. There just wasn't enough people to go around and hit all the seminars. So therefore it just didn't make any financial sense for us to keep doing it. But the reason we did it again was to provide legitimate, unbiased, full blown, comprehensive holistic education. We weren't selling anything in our seminars. We were simply going over things like financial planning, tax planning, insurance planning, retirement planning, retirement retirement income planning, investment management, investment allocation, a bunch of really good educational stuff. It was 2 hours and 15 minutes long with a break in the middle. And all we ever did at the end of these seminars is we would say if you had interest in getting a second opinion on your portfolio, your financial plan, sign up and we'll have an intro call. And then after that intro call, if you want to go through our second opinion process, then we would go through that second opinion process, which we still do today, by the way. But like I said, the market got too saturated. Just didn't make sense anymore. But these days I'm sure there's still good financial advisory firms out there, good fiduciaries that are probably doing dinner seminars. But what I typically hear, see, I get the invitations myself in my own mailbox at home. And what I typically see is people who work for insurance companies, whether it's their own insurance company or somebody else's, and they do these seminars and they're typically selling annuities or insurance or both. That's the first thing you'll see the second thing that I've noticed is, and um, again I'm not going to name any names or any companies here, but I've done some research on some companies I've seen and I've noticed that for instance, they'll say that they're a fiduciary and that they have an ria, which stands for registered Investment Advisory firm, and that they offer managed money and that they do comprehensive planning and that they have the ability to do what are called wrap fees, which means they wrap the account in a flat, fix fixed percentage of assets under management and then they manage the money for you that way. And then I'll go, when I go look at the, do some research and really dig deep into the weeds, I find out that this, this RIA doesn't have any clients in it. Or maybe they have one or two clients that are in the RIA and that's it. So in other words, imagine they've got an insurance company and they have a registered investment advisory firm. And in the insurance company they have say 400 clients, 500 clients that they have sold annuities and insurance to and earned commissions, of course, on um, those annuities and insurance policies. And then they have this RIA which is supposed to be more holistic, obviously more comprehensive in terms of solutions based advice. But when you look under the COVID or under the hood, that there's one client in the RIA and that's it. So in other words, they set up the RIA so that they can say they have one, but nobody actually ends up getting the advice that's given by a typical RIA firm, which is what we are, by the way. We're a registered investment advisory firm, we're a fiduciary. But in order to be a true fiduciary, and we'll get into this in a second here, I probably said it in the last podcast. In order to be a NAPA registered or NAPFA affiliated fiduciary, you cannot have any brokerage licenses, you cannot have any insurance licenses because in order to be a true fiduciary, you, you cannot have the conflict of interest of charging commissions, period. And so as a result, what ends up happening is you've got, and we'll talk about the fiduciary law here in a minute, but you've got these insurance agents, unfortunately, who are allowed because the insurance industry is unregulated. They say whatever they want, for the most part they're not getting audited. And then they'll have an RIA firm and maybe the RIA firm that gets an audit once a year, once every two years. But when you walk in, when the auditor comes in to examine the RIA office, the RIA has one client or two clients or three clients, and that's it. Because they really aren't focused on the ria. They're just using it as a way to say that they're a fiduciary. When it's questionable, at best, that's a problem. So this is another, I would say, concern or uh, that I have about the industry that unfortunately isn't so great. The next one would be. And you don't see this a lot. This is pretty rare. Unlike insurance agents, there are lots of insurance agents that kind of pose as financial planners. They set up separate RIAs so that they can say they're fiduciary, but then they don't actually use the RIA at all. There's lots of that. I've seen plenty of it. But you don't see a lot of this, though, attorneys running side gigs as financial advisory firms. And the reason you don't see it a lot is you can ask any attorney. If you have a friend who's an attorney. If you work with somebody who's an attorney, just ask them. Go up tomorrow, uh, next time you're at work, next time you see him, uh, a friend of yours, just ask. If you're an attorney, especially an estate planning attorney, somebody who does wills, trusts, powers of attorneys, estate plans for people. How do you feel? Ask them. How do you. How would you feel about setting up a financial advisory firm and offering financial advice and financial planning advice and investment management advice and insurance advice? And I bet 99 out of a hundred of them would say that's, uh, a no, no. Or they might say, that's not so ethical. That's not really something that's looked favorably upon in our industry. And as you probably know, when it comes to the law and sit for the boards, you get your Juris Doctor and you become an attorney. And they are really strict about their ethics, and I think that's a good thing. But every once in a while you'll get an attorney. And I know of one, at least one here in Ohio. But again, there's not a lot of them that they'll. Basically, they set up a financial advisory firm or an insurance company or both. They name it something completely different from their law firm. And then once they get a client to do an estate plan. And usually they overcharge, by the way. But once they get their Client to do an estate plan. Then they go taking the information they've learned from the estate plan, because the estate plan has to include all assets, so you get a full inventory of everything you own. When you do an estate plan, then they start cross selling the. The estate planning work with annuities and insurance. And I, uh, don't know if this has changed in the last few years, but years ago I know that there used to be just a couple insurance companies that would basically sell insurance and annuities through attorneys and pay them. And it wasn't even in Ohio. It was in a state in central, like maybe the Midwest more. I think it was Wisconsin. For some reason, that state's sticking out to me. But anyway, so another problem I see another one of the wolves of Wall Street, I'll say when you peel back the curtain is, uh, attorneys that, you know, they are supposed to be just doing estate planning. And then they set up a financial advisory firm and they start selling annuities and insurance. And it's a conflict of interest. And it's, uh, it's definitely not them staying in their lane. And while it's technically legal, so it's not illegal at all for them to do that. I think what burns me is when you see these attorneys and when they're working on the financial advisory side or the insurance company side of the fence, you'll see them advertise and they'll say really bad things, essentially selling against fiduciaries and selling against financial advisors who are transparent and lay out all the cards on the table. And it just really fires me up to see that happen, considering it's like the pot and the kettle whole thing. It's first of all, fiduciaries, true fiduciaries are not unethical. And that should go without saying. That's why the word exists, by the way. But the other thing is that in the midst of doing something, call it somewhat unethical, even though it's not illegal, these people then turn around and they start bashing other professions, saying that they're not being ethical. Uh, I choke on the irony. But anyway, so that's another one. So attorneys running side gigs as financial advisory firms, insurance companies, and so on. And along those same lines, there are advisors. And one of these advisors that does it a lot is actually one of the attorneys running a side gig as a financial advisory firm where they go and buy TV time and they make it look like it's a news station. It's more of what you would call almost like an advertorial or you might call it an infomercial. That's what it is. Because they have to pay for that 30 minutes of television time or pay for the hour long television time. And then they look like they're. But it looks like they've got it set up so there's two chairs, they're being interviewed and providing education and what seems to be unbiased, good, honest education. But again, some of the education, and I struggle to even call it that, first of all, again, it's paid for. The news station did not ask this company to come on because they had great information to share with the public that they want to put their name on. They paid to be on the show. So the news station is making money. Um, and as long as they're not doing anything illegal, then obviously the news station has no problem having one because they're making advertising dollars at the end of the day. Definitely. Whether it's tv, um, if it's an article online or in a newspaper, ah, always differentiate and look for the fine print and differentiate between real news, real education, real good, unbiased advice. And that goes back to education and the ones that are advertorials, that are TV time being purchased, articles being purchased, where you write whatever you want. And it's not, you're not being by the editor to contribute an article. Rather you're, uh, paying for a page or two to advertise your company and say, I don't know, again, not whatever you want, but to say things, to basically sell your services, so to speak. To me, that's. It's not the same. They're definitely not one of the same. Another one, and this is fun, and I'm going to walk through these, I call them questionable designations. Now, these designations are all real certifications and designations, the ones I'm about to share with you. But when you look online or you Google them, um, you know, you can find out there's no shortage of designations, let's put it that way. I know I have a few and um, I don't even put all of them after my last name because it starts to look ridiculous at a certain point. In fact, you start to look insecure if you put too many designations after your name because it starts looking like you have a serious complex. But anyway, these designations are all real that I'm about to share with you, but not all of them are as reputable as others. So first we're going to go through some questionable ones and why they're questionable and why, um, maybe ones you should be a little bit careful. If you meet somebody who has these designations, just know what they mean, know the organization that sponsors them or issues the designations, and know how little or how big of importance you should put on the designation itself. So here's a few. For example, the first one is Certified Retirement Financial Advisor crfa. And to quote what I found online, it said, uh, there are less rigorous standards for this designation. I had never heard of it, actually. Second one is called the Chartered Senior Financial Planner. I also had never heard of this one. But what I found online was that it, uh, targets seniors and there's insufficient oversight surrounding the designation. So none of that sounds good to me. The next one is Registered Financial Specialist. Again, I'd never heard of this one either. But uh, what I found was that it lacks comprehensive education to either get the designation in the first place or maintain it, or both. The next one's called Certified Annuity Specialist. Now I have seen this quite a few times. It's not, that's not something, you know, advertised or nobody's going to run around saying you should hire me because I'm a certified Annuity Specialist. But the quote I found online was that it lacks broader financial planning scope. And I think that goes without saying because an annuity certified, uh, annuity specialist, somebody who specializes in annuities, that kind of goes right along with some of the things we said on the last episode, part one, where overselling annuities, selling annuities to the wrong people. Ms. Selling them. They obviously have huge commissions in most cases, unless you're working with a fiduciary like us, there's another 25 or so fiduciaries in central Ohio alone. And we fiduciaries have access to annuities that have no commissions. So we can buy them and sell them weeks later if we want to. It's not a big deal. But I digress. So next one's called Certified Wealth Preservation Planner. This one I'd never heard of either. And the uh, quote I found in the description was that it's more marketing than skill. And I thought that was interesting. That was pretty forward. Next one's called Certified Income Specialist. I've also seen this one before along with uh, a Certified Annuity Specialist. And the quote or the description that was given in this one when I was looking this up online was that it's primarily used as a marketing distinction and obviously that's not good. But Certified Income Specialist, probably somebody who sells annuities as well because annuities are an income producing product in Some cases Accredited Financial Counselor. Never heard of it. Um, the quote again, uh, that I found online was that it's less prestigious and comprehensive. Certified Asset Protection Planner is the next one capp, um, again, never heard of it before. Uh, and this one kind of shocked me because what I found about it was that online it said that this designation might skirt legal or ethical boundaries. And that sounds awful, obviously. But anyway, Certified Investment Management Analyst. Now I actually have this as one of the reputable designations on the next page. So as we get into some ones that are good and I'm going to share some of those with you as well. So we're going to end on a positive note here. The quote did say that it's less rigorous than the cfa. Yes, of course it is. The CFA is a monster of a designation, a monster test. It's three parts, very difficult. So the cema, uh, again, Certified Investment Management Analyst is definitely not nearly as difficult, but I don't think it's a bad designation. I think that there's some legitimacy to the CEMA Registered Financial Planner rfp. I had heard of that one, which is funny because it says it's not well regulated or recognized. I think I'd heard of this one way back in the early 2000s like when I was starting my career, but. And then the last but not least, I have seen this one several times and I don't like it. But it's the Certified Senior Advisor. People who target seniors who are typically trying to sell them annuities, insurance, or both are typically using the csa saying, I'm a Certified Senior Advisor, I specialize in working with seniors and dealing with their issues. And it's uh, uh, you know, do you really or just want to sell insurance and annuities to them? And the quote I found online was that it has low educational requirements and it's used more as a marketing tool, which I totally 100% agree with that statement. So let's change gears and talk about the good stuff. So the good designations. So when you're talking to financial advisors, wealth managers, financial planners, when you're interviewing financial advisors, some of the things you should look for or ask the advisor if they're a Certified Financial Planner. The CFP is without a doubt the most elite designation or certification in the entire industry. When it comes to financial planning and full scale wealth management. It's an extremely difficult exam. It takes at least two years of uh, post college education and then an enormous exam. These days I believe it's a two part six hour exam. Back when I took it in the 2000s. It was a three part ten hour examination. Just a beast of a test and lots of great information and education there. So definitely a good designation. The next one we already talked a little bit about the Chartered Financial Analyst designation. The cfa, again a monster exam. Uh, it's actually three parts and it's more about fundamental analysis. Price to earnings ratios, price to book ratios, kicking the tires on companies, metaphorically speaking, but definitely a good designation in the field. The sister designation to the CFA is called the Chartered Market Technician designation and they share the same code of ethics. So the CFA and the cmt, there's lots of what are called dual charter holders. In other words, they have both the CMT and the M. Cfa. I'm uh, personally a CFP and a cmt. What we do here is financial planning and portfolio management using primarily relative strength and other methods of technical analysis. And our portfolio, Chartered Market Technician is the designation that I have. And it's also a three part exam. So three different exams, four to, I think it was like four to six hours each. Something like that takes about 18 to 24 months if you're screaming through the material. But it's lots of great education. Certified Financial Technician is actually uh, very, very similar to the Chartered Market Technician designation. It's also technical analysis based but it's, it is an international designation. So it's based, it's more recognized at the international level as opposed to just domestically here in the US not to say that CMT isn't internationally recognized because it is. But the Certified Financial Technician designation is through the International Federation of Technical Analysts. So that's why I say it's internationally based. The uh, next one is the Chartered Financial Consultant designation. The only thing I'll caution you here, this is a good designation. It's got good education, it's reputable. The only thing I'll caution you is that a lot of the times when I see this designation, it's typically paired with Chartered Life Underwriter and other insurance based designations. And I'm not sure why that is. There's probably some history and logic behind it. But all I will say was just be careful. If you find a financial advisor who's a chfc, that's good. But if they also have annuity and insurance licenses, I'd be asking questions like what types of portfolios do you build? Do you sell primarily insurance annuities? What are your feelings about insurance and annuities? So make sure the advice you're getting is more holistic, uh, in nature and not based on being sold insurance products. That's all. Everybody for the most part's heard of cpa. Certified Public Accountant goes without question. That's a great designation. You don't necessarily see a lot of it in the financial advisory world. Financial planning, investment management. Every once in a while you'll see somebody who's a CPA and they're say a cfp. The only thing that I question is whether or not somebody has time to do taxes and manage a financial planning firm as well. And I only say that to anybody who's listening to this. If I've offended you, um, I apologize. If you are a dual charter holder as a CFP and a CPA and you're doing taxes and financial planning. The only reason I say that I question how, whether that's possible is because I wouldn't want to do it. I would not want to get a CPA and work 70, 80 hours a week during tax season, all while trying to hold up a financial planning practice as well. That'd be tough. So my only question is, can you wear yourself too thin? I guess so. But obviously CPA is a great designation. Next one. The CrPC, which stands for Certified Retirement Plan Counselor, is one that you would get on the way to getting the CFP. So it's basically two of the six pillars in the CFP curriculum are based on the. The CrPC. So now I would say that's a good, reputable designation. But typically these people are on their way to get the CFP at some point. Um, another good one is the Certified Divorce Financial Analyst designation. This is for people advisors that kind of specialized in helping people who are going to get divorced. They have gone through a divorce, maybe they're going through a divorce at the moment, and they're specialized in helping those people with the specific needs that they face, involving things like quadros, qualified Domestic Relations orders, things like that, which we have a lot of education here at our office. When it comes to that stuff, I would say we're extremely dangerous. In other words, we know a lot. But I definitely wouldn't. Haven't been through the curriculum, and I definitely wouldn't consider myself, say, a specialist, but I could figure it out, let's put it that way. Considering all the other things, all the other education we've had here, uh, Certified Exit Planning Advisor is pretty specific, Kind of like the Certified Divorce Financial Analyst cdfa. The SEPA, or Certified Exit Planning Advisor is specific to business owners, just like the Certified Divorce Financial Analyst is specific to people who are going through a divorce. Have Been through a divorce and so on. So the, uh, SEPA or Certified Exit Planning Advisor, these are people or advisors who are helping business owners grow their companies, increase efficiency, reduce customer concentration, reduce risk, uh, create continuity, stakeholder alignment and get the business owner not spending so much time in the business and really spending more time working on the business and really getting more free time. So building a more profitable company, increasing enterprise value. And if you can't tell, one of the designations I have is a sepa and we work with business owners extensively in this area. Another one that's pretty. You don't see it a lot, but it's a reputable designation is the Accredited Investment Fiduciary designation. You typically see this with people who work with 401k plans. They work with business owners as well, typically, but especially with, with 401k plans and retirement plans like 457 defer comp plans, cash balance plans, profit sharing plans, things like that. AIF is definitely a good designation. And then I'll finish here with the list because like I said earlier on the last slide, I put SEMA as a less reputable designation to the cfa. But again, I didn't think that was fair because I think that the CEMA is definitely a pretty good reputable designation. Kind of like the cd. Where is it at the, uh, crpc, the Certified Retirement Plan Counselor designation, like I said earlier, is a designation you would get on the way to getting a cfp. And I would say the cema, the Certified Investment Management Analyst, might be a designation you get on the way to becoming a cfa. If you're going that route, it's just not all the way there. That's all the next enough on designations. We're going to move forward to talking about basically understanding when you walk into an office that it might not even be the advisor's fault. They just can't provide you with what you need or what you want because that's just not what they do. So I make the joke here that you wouldn't go to Jiffy Lube to get new brakes and tires. You go to Jiffy Lube and you say, hey, I need new tires and I need my brake pads replaced. And they say, sir, ma', am, whatever, we don't sell brakes or tires here. We can give you an oil change. And then you say in reply, but I really need brakes and tires. And they say, I'll give you an oil change. And what I mean by that, and I've talked a little bit about it, so I'll just Elaborate briefly. Here is when you go to a, uh, discount brokerage firm, E Trade for instance, you're going to get the cheapest, most inexpensive method of managing your portfolio, your retirement portfolio. But you're not going to get any advice, especially no fiduciary driven advice. You're not going to get any financial planning, or advanced planning for that matter. You're not going to get any, any recommendations when it comes to charitable planning, asset transfers from one generation to the next, college savings, insurance planning, tax planning, you're not going to get any of those things. That's uh, just, it's not going to happen. But that's why it's inexpensive. So you don't go to E Trade to get comprehensive wealth management. Let's you go to E Trade to trade stocks. That's what it's for. Not to say you can't do it yourself. I always say, and I've said this a million times in my career, I swear that you can manage your own portfolio and you can do your own financial planning. You just have to have two things. One, the interest and two, the time. And if you don't have the interest in it, you're definitely not going to spend time on it. And even if you do have interest, the problem is you're busy. You're maybe a mom or a dad, you probably have a job, you're trying to make money and provide for your family while at the same time being a good husband, wife, like I said, a dad or a mom. There's just not a lot of time left in the day to deal with this stuff. But if you have the interest and you have the time, and then I do think it's possible discount brokerage would be one of them and then you wouldn't go to an insurance company. And I guess this is where this slide really comes from here, if you're watching on YouTube, is you wouldn't go to an insurance company for a comprehensive, unbiased, holistic wealth management service and financial plan. You just wouldn't do that. But people do it and they don't do it intentionally. They just don't understand or they don't know. That's not what, that's not what they do. There. Um, people who work for insurance companies are incentivized to sell insurance, whether that be life insurance, whole life, universal life, variable universal life indexed life insurance policies, variable annuities, indexed annuities, because that's how they make their bread and butter. And then on top of that, when you have the vast majority of revenue being made both at the company level and at the advisor level through commissions on insurance and annuities. It's really difficult, I imagine, for the advisors in question who are put in that situation to be unbiased and provide unbiased advice because of the fact that the commissions are so high, what you want to do. And I put NAPFA up here on purpose. So the website is the national association of uh, Personal Financial Advisors or napfa. It's not dot com, it's dot org. So N a P F A N as in Nancy A P as in Paul F as in Frank a dot org. The national association of Personal Financial Advisors is the place to go where you can put your zip code in and you can find fiduciaries near you. And I don't mean fiduciaries as stated by the law in Washington D.C. today. True. All the way through fiduciaries that uh, give fiduciary driven advice. These fiduciaries are not allowed to have brokerage licenses, insurance licenses, because if you have an insurance license, if you have a broker's license, you can legally charge a commission. And the problem with the industry is the commissions at the end of the day. And so the way fiduciaries and fee only firms are regulated, or I should say self regulated, taking the brokerage licenses out of the picture and the insurance licenses out of the picture, you remove the commission. Which means that it doesn't really matter whether you do financial planning on an hourly basis, on a fixed fee basis, if it's included in the fee that you charge, like a wrap fee for instance. Because even when the financial plan is implemented and the money's invested, it doesn't matter whether you're invested 100% in large company stocks or 100% of your money is in the Japanese yen, if that's the best place for your money, then the firm in question and the fiduciary that you're working with gets paid exactly the same. There's no conflict of interest when it comes to determining where, how your money's invested and how much money they're going to make. They make the same, so they're on the same side of the table as you, working with you like your family members. And that's how you want it. So speaking of that, the last thing I wanted to show you today or uh, tell you if you're listening on itunes or Apple podcasts, Spotify as I'll just walk you through this image here, which is the difference between fee only and fee based firms. And I'M sorry that there's so much minutiae in this industry, but there is. At the end of the day, true fiduciaries are what are called fee only registered investment advisory firms. So fee only RIA firms, fee only RIA firms can provide advice for a fee, whether that be a fixed fee, a flat fee, a uh, wrap fee, a percentage of assets under management but they cannot earn, commissions they cannot earn, uh, there's, they don't have the conflicts of interest that fee based firms do. Now fee based firms are almost all, or at least most of the firms that you've heard of. And in the interest of keeping myself out of trouble, I'm not going to go through a list of examples of these companies like I do in front of our clients or on, on intro calls with prospective clients that are looking for a second opinion because I don't want to. Like I said, I want to get myself in trouble here. But most of the firms you've heard of are fee based firms which can charge the same fee that we do as fiduciaries, but they can also get commissions from annuities, insurance policies, insurance companies, mutual funds. They'll also have contests. A um, lot of these firms, if not all of them, where you know, every quarter, let's just say there's an annuity that, you know, whoever sells X amount of dollars of this annuity gets an all inclusive expense paid trip to Miami and all of a sudden now everybody needs annuities, but not any annuity, uh, but this annuity that's going to get them on this trip. There's fee based firms and again this is all minutiae. Fee based firms can charge a flat fee, fixed fee, percentage of assets under management, and commissions on annuities and commissions on insurance and commissions on mutual funds, commissions to buy and sell stocks, and then the contests I mentioned. This doesn't even consider insurance companies by the way, which would be another type of company. But anyway, so hopefully that makes sense and hopefully you've learned something between the part one and now this part two. But check out part one if you didn't already a lot of good information in there, just like we did today. And then uh, it really sheds some light on what to look out for, how to keep yourself safe, how to keep your money safe and make sure you're working with the right people to ensure that you're going to make work optional someday and that you're in the right hands with somebody who's truly going to take care of you. A true fiduciary that's our time for the day. Feel free to follow us on all the socials, check out our website and you'll also find, like I said, other links and contact info on the in the show notes. But as I always say, there's thousands and thousands of podcasts out there and you chose to give ours a listen today. So thank you so much for tuning in and we'll see you next time.

Speaker A: We hope you enjoyed today's episode. If you'd like a second opinion on your retirement plan or investment strategy, please head over to libertaswealth.com this podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be considered as legal, financial tax or as a basis for investment decisions. Always consult a certified financial planner or a fee only fiduciary advisor before acting on any ideas discussed.