Due to the over regulation of the financial independent planners, many of these specialists no longer wish to take clients that have less than $500,000 to invest. Often, it takes too much paper work to process and each new client comes with regulatory and litigation risks. Who loses in all this? Everyone in the middle class and all those that have less than $500,000 to invest, the very people who need these services the most.
It is not that these practitioners do not care, these solo professional financial planners do very much care, but due to regulatory nightmare they are not allowed to care anymore. This is why the solo-professional financial planner is a dying breed, as they are being consumed by larger offices, and brokerage firms that are in it to sell their own financial proprietary products, or make money churning accounts and flipping stocks like a bunch of day traders.
Under the auspice of trying to regulate the industry, protect every consumer and investor, we have created regulations which end up hurting the small solo-professionals, the very person that are on the ground floor helping the consumers and taking business away from the wire houses that didn’t care about the little guys.
We’ve made a terrible error and we’ve allowed the wire houses to use our regulators to attack their competition, leaving more money for themselves and less competition in the market place, indirectly screwing over the middle-class investor. To listen to the SEC at the Congressional hearings justify their position in making all these excessive rules, you’d swear they care about the individual investor.
Of course, that is pretty hard to believe considering the results of their actions. I am disgusted that the SEC allowed this global crisis meltdown because they were so busy making a new rule every seven days against independent broker dealers, and solo professional financial planners. If you don’t see this yourself please go ask a financial planner about this.