Personal Finance

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I’ve had USAA accounts for many years now, and have consolidated my 401K to IRA accounts to them as I changed jobs over the years. All of my transactions have gone very smoothly and effortlessly. When I didn’t know much of anything about trading, or investing, they seemed very helpful to me.

However, as I’ve matured as an investor I’ve learned that:

A) They don’t tell you anything about your account options when you initiate a rollover. Unless you specifically ask for a brokerage account, they will roll you into one of their extremely limited mutual fund accounts.

B) They have pretty good no load mutual funds, if you’re looking for a relatively stable investing platform. They are very conservative, and are proud of their middle of the road approach. But you’re not going to get great returns. And there are actually other funds with lower fee structures available.

C) Their advisers are not to be trusted for advice. I’ve gotten all sorts of squirrely bad financial advice from them. One guy (brokerage department) recommended an annuity, and another guy (financial planner) recommended that I spend $5000 to have them analyze my retirement plans. The biggest trouble with both of these advice points is that I’m in my early 40’s. And both answers were in response to inquiries on how I might invest 6 figure capital portfolio in order to generate income. They’re all just reading from scripts provided by the company selling the product du jour for their particular department.

Also, during 2007 I sold all of my investments when the market dropped in May. Admittedly it was a knee jerk reaction on my part, but I still don’t regret doing it given my knowledge base at the time. Surprisingly, I received a personal phone call from their mutual fund department basically begging me to buy back into a declining market. Apparently a lot of people were doing the same thing, so they turned to proactive sales tactics. While there may have been some validity in returning to the market in May, I never would have received the phone call in kind telling me to sell in Oct, so I’m actually better off now.

D) You’re better off using google finance or yahoo finance website as research tools and technical information. I find USAA’s website to be bare bones, and super dry. I always have trouble trying to find the details about investments using their platform.

Think long-term, low return, conservative, hands off portfolios, and you’ll probably like them a lot! I do think they would suit a middle of the pack investor just fine.

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