Your Financial Adviser Got a Raise. Did You?
Maybe you didn't have a very good 2008. I sure didn't, and neither did a lot of people, including auto workers, journalists, realtors, bankers, manufacturers and importers and exporters.
But financial advisers did just great. In a survey, they reported their income went up to up to $215,345, on average, from $195,394 the year before. That' s right. In a year in which their clients lost more money than in any 12 month stretch since the Great Depression, the average financial planner got a 10% raise.
The data come from the 2009 Survey of Trends in the Financal Planning Industry, jointly produced by the College for Financial Planning and financial market research firm Cerulli Associates. I asked Bing Waldert of Cerulli and Jesse Arman of the College how planners could see their income go up when their clients' assets were crashing. They weren't sure, but were happy to speculate. Maybe it's "survivorship bias." (A Darwinian skew towards more established and richer planners because the crisis put weaker ones out of business.) Maybe customers required a lot more handholding, and the planners charged for it. Maybe, Waldert suggested, some survey respondents just didn't know how much money they made and overestimated. A lot of ordinary people do that--although one would hope that financial planners would be more on top of things.
Other things worthy of note in the survey::
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