Recently a colleague of mine shared with me that her financial planner had been paying her a fixed sum of money every quarter for her CPF investments in OA and SA accounts. She was quite happy about it until she wanted to upgrade her home. When she got to HDB, she was shocked to find that there was zero amount of money in her account when there should be some balance left after financing her current HDB loans. To her surprise, more CPF money had been recently deducted from her account for more investments which she didn't know about. It turned out that her financial planner had keyed in her PIN without her knowledge to approve of the trades on her behalf. He did this without informing her at all. She was so furious. She scolded him and he apologized several times. She immediately went down to the IFAST office to lodge a complain but they could not do anything at all for this FA was from an agent's office. All her investments were immediately sold off the following week because she wanted to close her account. All-in all, she made some losses in her CPF investments.
The following week after that, I read from somewhere that it is wrong for an FA to promise a cashback from CPF investments because CPF is only meant for the retirement. Oh dear... my colleague's been cheated...
So the next time you pick out a financial planner to do your investments, make sure you do some research first and understand what is going on in the financial world. You'll never know what sort of rouges you might meet out there.
Well, I'm not saying that all FAs are bad. There are good guys out there too. It's just good to always understand what your FA is doing for you and all those financial jargons...
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