AKA “surprisingly, oligopolies are there to make money and care about their customers just enough not to pee on their faces while someone else is looking”.
AKA “surprisingly, oligopolies are there to make money and care about their customers just enough not to pee on their faces while someone else is looking”.
I’m lucky to have a lot of savings. I regularly get calls and emails from Scotiabank telling me to buy mutual funds and increase my credit limit. I always figured that if someone contacts you saying they have an offer that will make you a lot of money, they’re lying. CBC seems to confirm that.
If you have a notable amount in savings, investing it in some way is generally a good idea, but I agree with not trusting your bank to steer you right.
I do. It’s in GICs at 5.25% interest. The bank wants me to switch it to mutual funds with a 2% management fee.
All-equity mutual funds net fees will, on average, return more than 5¼%. (Should be about 7-8% on average). That said, that comes with a lot of volatility (value fluctuations) and you can expect sometime in the next 50 years to have a year that’s down as much as 50%, but over the same 50 years it will outperform any GIC.
They’re still a terrible product, though. An ETF will do the same, but be worth about 3-4× as much after 50 years due to mutual fund fees eating most of the compound gains.
Anyway, the ethics of mutual funds are why I quit the finance industry before even really getting started in it. I did financial analytics as a co-op student for one of the major banks in the mutual funds group and had the skills and connections to make a career in finance, but I couldn’t stomach making a career working on financial products that are predatory.