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The dirty secrets of financial planners Written by Stuart Washington

“The financial planning industry has a series of dirty little secrets that make investment banks look like paragons of virtue. And that’s pretty hard to do in this day and age…

While I freely accept there are honest, committed and sincere financial planners, they are currently caught in an industry structure so tangled that it’s hard to pick the good from the bad…

And before those honest planners start crying foul about unfair generalisations (a big thanks to the planner who sent the e-mail with the subject line “Scummy journalism” in response to a previous column), it’s worth remembering that everything written above is based on criticism levelled by other financial planners.”
Washington outlines the start of his article by comparing the financial planning industry with investment banks.

i.e. Investment banks vs Financial Planning industry

as

Paragons of virtue vs “dirty little secrets”

Washington then attempts to provide a insulting disclaimer (more of a get out clause that is feebly proposed) that he freely accepts that there are honest, committed and sincere financial planners.

AND

that his claims are “based on criticism levelled by other financial planners”. Something which confuses me and probably a majority of Washington’s readers is the idea that you can be judging that the an industry has dirty little secrets and then judge it to be “levelled” (by the way Washington, my spell-checker picked out a mistake within your article. You should probably embrace that little button option up the top there called spell-check. It says “leveled”) criticism.

“These are not practices that appear in submissions made to the Corporations and Financial Services parliamentary committee currently charged with implementing change.

But it is worth spelling them out in some detail because they are practices that have threatened the integrity of the industry as a whole.

Both the industry and the parliamentary committee need to understand these practices and how they developed to fully comprehend the need for change. Let’s hope they then make changes that put the industry on a completely new footing.”

I have Nine Letters that answers these three paragraphs quoted above:
PDS (Product Disclosure Statement)
SoA (Statement of Advice)
FSG (Financial Services Guide)

Though I agree with the majority of his content, his sensationalist reporting astounds me (not really, because it is that bad). This is a poorly researched article with no solid basis that a piece of shit could provide. Even shit can be gathered to belong to someone, but his reporting contributed a bunch of mish mash aimed to confuse his readers into believing he were their Aussie battler of a reporter.