Couples BECOMING ONE (rant).

I have been meaning to write this thread for some time now, but every time I do, I put it off.

Then I go to work, and the thing I’m going to write about makes me angry and I think “I should write about it”.

Thus ends the cycle.

I remember a video about former NFL player Darren McFadden. His financial advisor had power of attorney over him, using fraudulent documents. He lost an investment that later would have been worth $200,000,000.

Side note, the advisor’s name is Michael Vick. Not related to the football player Michael Vick, who would also be the victim of fraudulent investments.

I work for an investment company. I would be SHAKEN to see a power of attorney for a client that wasn’t elderly or disabled.

One of my pet peeves at work is seeing a client who has all of their contact details set to their advisor’s details.

There’s absolutely no way to contact the client. The financial advisor wrote the original application for them, and they put their own details down. Yes, the client signed off on it, but they shouldn’t be allowed to!

This is especially frustrating and sad when you see a woman who’s put down her husband’s contact details as her own.

I don’t get it. I mean the whole idea of a joint account is kind of messed up.

Every single day, people call up on their partner’s behalf. They say “I should be authorised on the account”. And sometimes they are, the client can add an authorised representative. So I begrudgingly continue.

Or I ask the caller to hand the phone to the actual client, the owner of the account. And they complete a security check and within five seconds, they pass the phone back to their partner, because “he/she does all the paperwork”.

Or when you’re talking to someone and their partner chimes in in the background like they’re the client’s lawyer.

It’s not right. At all. I don’t care if the client signs off on it, because at some point they’re going to have to interact with their own account. And it’s not safe to give someone else control.

I remember getting a complaint from a client who had to get a divorce, and the only way to turn a joint account into an individual account is to make a new policy. This means, though, that the client loses their tenure, so she would technically go from a 10-year client to a new client.

It turns out there’s a way around that, but she said to me in the moment that she had a company with her husband back in the 1990s, and every change she made had to be signed by her husband too, because he was an owner of the company. She said it’s very difficult for women to get a divorce because of everything that’s supposed to be in joint names.

This has gone wrong before.

At my previous role, I worked in CTP. They told us about an incident that happened.

A man called up to pay his ex-wife’s CTP. There was no e-mail on file, so he said “can you e-mail me the receipt?” Well, the receipt had his ex-wife’s new address and he went there.

The company found out the hard way, when she complained, and it was fined $25,000. They changed the rule. Someone can pay on behalf of someone else, but if there’s no e-mail on file, the receipt has to be mailed, and if there is an e-mail on file, only the client can send it somewhere else.

Ultimately, though, it’s probably the partner’s e-mail on file anyway…