Aftermath of going to financial presentation-dinner

Back at the end of January, I posted about maybe going to a dinner / financial sales presentation at a local restaurant. It’s been a while, but we ended up going, and I thought I’d give a rambling report on how things turned out.

(Spoiler: For those of you who said they would never bother going to one of these dinner/sales-presentations, I am about to validate your worldview. Personally, I feel like I’m batting .500 on these things, but more later.)

We signed up for the presentation and dinner at Spaghettini in Seal Beach, a restaurant I had been curious about. The other people at the table were nice, and one was a current client of the presenter. The food was … meh. Have you ever been some place where the food looks great but is a disappointment when you eat it? Maybe this was because it was their presentation/catering menu, but I don’t feel a need to go back again to find out. Anyway, I thought the flavor of the chicken marsala was so subtle that it might have had no flavor at all. It’s only outstanding quality was quantity - the thing was huge! I would have been happier with half the portion but decently marinated or something.

I don’t think I’m a major foodie - I mean on the whole I prefer German food to French food, for goodness sake! (Though I do remember one dessert souffle from 35 or so years ago - it was half chocolate and half orange.) But perhaps I’m spoiled by the variety available in SoCal. It may be that the only thing we are #1 in the nation for is congestion of automobile and air traffic, but we are #2 for pretty much everything else - including some good things.

The presentation itself was mildly entertaining. My wife was admiring his technique at building a “yes-ladder”. He repeatedly mentioned how he was a “fiduciary” and legally bound to put his clients’ interests first. The product he was talking about was an indexed annuity, which would not lose value even if the stock market went down - a selling point in these volatile times. The thing that interested me, though, was his saying he would do a financial audit for his clients. My general belief is that - assuming my assumptions are correct - our retirement is in good shape. So getting another opinion on the state of our finances - validating my assumptions - would be good. As a result, we signed up for an appointment at his office to see if we were a good fit as clients.

As we went to the appointment, I was half-inclined to put some money into an annuity for a few years as protection, since I’d been worrying about what the market might do. (This was in March, so before the April volatility, but not long enough before that an annuity contract could have been funded. So no hindsight regrets.) When we went in, he started off my saying to be a good fit we’d need to agree that our goals were 4 things: 1. to not lose any principal, no matter the market; 2. to be content with annual gains no higher than 10%, no matter the market; 3. to not need to withdraw more than 10% of the investment per year; and 4. (one other thing I can’t remember, but it was a property of the annuities he was selling).

I couldn’t say why, but I just couldn’t agree that those were our goals. After wrangling for a while, he concluded that we were not a good fit as customers, and we left. I reflected on the meeting for the next couple days. First, I concluded that the four things he listed were not my goals, but qualities of a product that might help me attain my goals. (My goal could be roughly summarized as “have a comfortable retirement and not end my days living under a bridge.”)

Then I came to a belief that requiring me to agree to these as my goals before proceeding was a cover for his claims of being a fiduciary - of acting in the client’s interest. Because if we agreed that our goals were the properties of the product he was selling, then of course he would be acting in our interest by selling us that product.

I’d said that I was batting .500. The previous presentation-dinner we’d gone to was better in all respects. I enjoyed the food more. I felt like I learned something (though maybe they were just confiriming my biases). And the calls later (these guys were based in San Diego, so too far for an office visit) were good. Though we ended up not going with them, my general feeling afterward was a bit of wishing in hindsight that I’d done more of what I’d been doing.

Don’t know if we’ll go to another one, though.