"If You Can - How Millennials Can Get Rich Slowly" by William J. Bernstein (Março 2014)
(...) Avoid 5 hurdles:
Hurdle Number Five: The financial services industry wants to make you poor and stupid.
(...)
Avoiding brokers (and advisors who, unlike brokers, do owe clients fiduciary responsibility) is harder
than it seems, since they’re liable to be your old college roommate, brother-in-law, or church or service
organization member. The best way of solving this problem is to deftly change the subject when these
folks bring the conversation around to finance or, if you don’t mind a little fibbing, to tell them that you
have no interest in money management. However you choose to handle this, a ready routine for
deflecting approaches from friends and relations in the finance industry is an essential survival skill.
(...)
To summarize, you are engaged in a life-and-death struggle with the financial services industry. Every
dollar in fees and expenses you pay them comes directly out of your pocket. (Be aware that you’re
often getting charged far more in mutual fund fees than that “expense ratio” listed on the prospectus or
annual report, which is often exceeded by the “transactional costs,” that is, adverse price changes that
result from moving around millions of shares, much of which accrues indirectly to the fund company.)
Act as if every broker, insurance salesman, mutual fund salesperson, and financial advisor you
encounter is a hardened criminal, and stick to low-cost index funds, and you’ll do just fine.