As of today, I am officially no longer a licensed stockbroker or financial advisor. I knew this day would come, and it is a relief to formally have that chapter in life behind me. This isn’t exactly a surprise, since I formally left the industry two years ago, but since then, my licenses have been dormant. Until now, I could have taken another financial services job and simply picked up where I left off from a licensing perspective. Now that my licenses have officially lapsed, I have to retake all of the licensing exams if I want to work as a broker again. Thankfully, I don’t want to do that.
What that means for this site is that I now feel some additional freedom to discuss topics that I wouldn’t have felt comfortable discussing while I still held licenses. My opinions and advice have not changed, but when I worked as an advisor there was always the fear of being vocal about opinions that differed from those of the company. For example, I personally prefer index funds to actively managed mutual funds. I’ll write more about this preference later, but as you might expect this contradicted the investment philosophy of my former employer. Even though I recommended index funds all of the time to clients, it was clear that they would have preferred clients to invest in actively managed funds or managed accounts.
This matters to this site because I feel more at ease sharing my opinions now that I won’t be representing anyone besides myself.
The post Broker No More appeared first on DIY Money Stuff.
