Retirement classes / seminars

[MN-Investor]

Once you hit your 50s, you start getting - or at least paying attention to - invitations to retirement seminars. The couple we attended included a free offer to review your financial information.

Have any of you attended one of these seminars? Did you pay or was it free? Did you find it informational? Did you follow up on the free review? Did that work out?

-------------------

In our case, we paid for the first seminar. The second one gave each of us a $25 gift card to a local restaurant for attending (that should have been a red flag, I guess).

Both seminars provided good information, talking about things like re-balancing investments, etc.

We didn't follow up on the first class - the one we paid for. Looking back, the Dow was about $13,000 at that point (Nov 07). When we took the 2nd seminar (Nov 08), the Dow was closer to $8,000 and our investments were down almost 30%. I think that's partly why we decided to meet with the second "adviser".

The first meeting with the "adviser" went well. It was a good experience for me because it made me do a better analysis of our income and expenses. The "adviser" asked what our goals were, etc., then we made an appt to come back in a few weeks. At that second meeting he gave us a nice bound book with all our financial information and started talking about what he had in mind for what we should do. BTW, we had a chunk of money sitting in a money market account at that point. We were expecting the "adviser" to talk stocks, bonds, etc. Nope. He wanted us to put virtually all our free money into two variable annuities and whole life insurance policies. We made an appt for a follow up meeting and left. My DH was horrified. I was puzzled. I told DH I would do research online to see if I was missing something. Both my research and a query to YM confirmed that this was not the way for us to go. I canceled our follow up meeting. We didn't need to lock in our losses. We've done well with our own investment strategies since then. But any time I want to get my DH wound up, I just bring up the name of that "adviser."

[dancinmama]

DH's company used to provide "free" seminars. The people giving the seminars were financial planners. They gave the seminars in hopes of increasing clientele.

We went to one of those seminars and found it to be very informative, as I recall.

In the last (5) years, we got an invitation for a free dinner / retirement seminar. The dinner was delicious, the seminar was a sales pitch for annuities. I enjoyed listening, but didn't bite.

[phil5185]

wanted us to put virtually all our free money into two variable annuities and whole life insurance policies.

What, no time shares? Just think how rich you would be if you had 'invested' in Florida Resorts? LOL

[sapphire12]

MN -- go to enjoy the dinner. I would be leary of signing up for anything that they are "selling".

[robbase]

just get a planner from NAPFA website