A financial advisor is pushing me to use Mainstay investments for both and IRA and a 529 account.?
Question:
Answer:
Why? Because she gets a sales commission. Vanguard, Fidelity, T Rowe Price do not give commissions.
Just for kicks lets do a one on one objective comparison--more or less.
T Rowe Price Capital Appreciation Fund 10 yr annual return 12.04%
Mainstay Capital Appreciation Fund 10 yr annual return 3.52%.
The difference is your financial advisor gets 5.75% of the amount you put into Mainstay, not one red cent from T Rowe Price. Actually, there may be more flowing under the table. I would hope not but those things do happen.
The only "good" reason would be to reduce your expenses by holding everything within one family of funds. Having north of a certain dollar amount in the same family typically reduces your expense ratio...
One bad reason might be that they pay (her) better commissions...
Check Mainstay out on http://www.fool.com then you'll know!
I suggest you dump your financial adviser and do your financial planning yourself.
Go to the Fidelity website and do some research. Take the time to read as much information as you can on the website. You will learn more there than from any fly by night financial adviser... and it sounds like yours is definitely a loser.
For your IRA:
http://personal.fidelity.com/products/re...
For your 529 plan:
http://personal.fidelity.com/planning/co...
Best wishes with your investments. One simple principle to use is: use index products/funds/ETFs as much as possible unless you know what you are doing in picking stocks. Remember very few investors outperform the indices. Certainly, any advice your financial advisor will give you will not. Go to it, you can do it.
Yeah, your financial advisor is pushing products that enrich them rather than you. Read some Bogle and educate yourself, and then ditch the advisor and go get a low-cost Index fund.
Now you know why ETFs are so popular. Get a Roth IRA. Buy DIA (tracks the Dow Jones industrial average) or SPY (tracks the SP500) and a developing nation ETF (except China which suffers from corruption). You will make more than most mutual funds (you will be in the top 20%) over the long term.
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