Friday, a friend/coworker and I were discussing the trade tariffs effects on our business, and last years stock market performance was mentioned, and I commented that it sure helped my 401k. Over the next few minutes I learned that neither he, nor 6 other coworkers near me, had even created an account to view their 401k balances they've been contributing to for years.
I ended up spending about 3 hours helping them all make accounts, and move their monies out of the abhorrently low returning, high fee fund they've been rotting in for the past decade. Turns out, all 7 of them just took the advice of the "fund advisor" that starts your account for you, contributing everything into a single fund that has returned a paltry 2.2% average over the past 5 years, and 2.5% over the past ten. All while having a 0.79% expense ratio. The age of their accounts ranged from 2 years to a high of 11 years, and none of them had even looked at the funds during this time. Needless to say, I helped them review fund performances and choose better funds, as well as diversify and not have everything in a single fund.
This was kind of a shock, and led to some lively discussion about it after, with them all being reasonably upset that the advisor pushed them off into such an account, and that they had been too afraid to ask other coworkers what they were doing with their accounts.
I feel like the stigma that it's taboo to discuss your salary with coworkers has bled into some feeling as though it's also bad to talk about anything involving money. Investments, retirement, etc all seem to be out of the realm of normal discussion.
Submitted July 15, 2018 at 03:35AM by deepsouthsloth https://ift.tt/2JoZDJW
