A little backstory on this one.
A friend of mine had a part time gig working for a financial company more or less as a financial planner. I.e. they would come to your house sit down run through a budget with you, savings, insurance and all the other stuff. I already had everything set up but thought it would be good to possibly have an "expert" come in and look at it. So we sat down and i pulled out my spreadsheet of my last 4 years of spending down to the penny and breakdown of where all the savings were.
Finally the sales pitch came and it was to move retirement accounts under the umbrella of their company and they will manage them for you. This was prior to me knowing about MMM so I said sure and transferred an old RRSP from an old employer into this new plan.
A month later I get a letter showing me where it's all invested and I see it's in an global equity ETF, "Cool that fits into my portfolio well" I thought.
Just recently I run into said person and happen to ask what the MER is for the investment, 2.89%!!!!! My jaw almost hit the floor. I just ran the numbers on the difference between 2.89% and 0.15% in a market returning 7% over 25 years and it looks like they'd be getting 53% of my returns, or 62% over 40 years!
Needless to say I need to get out of that investment very quickly. I was kind of surprised because this is a great guy however he MUST know that he is taking a massive amount of returns from his customers while not actually giving them good advice.
Very glad it was <10k in that account.
