After a skiing accident and months of muscle pains, Obermatt CEO Dr. Hermann J. Stern went to see his neighbor, osteopath Michael Stadler from Osteopathy Central in Zurich. After he solved Dr. Stern's problems with surprising ease, he asked if Dr. Stern could help him with his retirement savings.
Dr. Stern told Michael that he could do that for him, and he would even do it for free. The only condition: they would be creating a video out of it. The result is the video series "Retirement planning at the Osteopathy Central", which starts today.
The first piece of advice was easy: Don’t spend money on investment advisors or investment products like funds. Period.
The reason is as simple as it is convincing: Investment advisors usually have the exact opposite interest than the savers. Savers want to achieve the highest possible returns in the long run. The primary goal of advisors, on the other hand, is to avoid short-term losses because they drive away customers.
Avoiding short-term losses creates high costs and thus less capital for the saver in the long run. Simple as that. What helps the investment advisor harms the investor.
In other words: Investment advisors want to avoid losses
because they drive away customers.
That’s why advisors want the opposite of what savers want.
The bottom line: You can only save on your own because investment products and advisors will harm your retirement savings.
PS: Advice on retirement provision, also called financial planning, is something different than investment consultation. Most investment services and products are paid with commissions for the advisors that depend on the amount of the assets.
The higher the assets, the bigger the commission. This is how advisors lose their innocence: they depend on you staying with them as long as possible.