Sunday 5th Feb 2012 04:39 AM
Welcome to Qotion.com!
Qotion.com is a website for you to browse and discuss financial products. Currently, we are undergoing further development, and hope to serve you when we relaunch the site with new features.
Fri, 09/04/2009 - 16:06
Cast Your Vote:
Are Financial planners just a better title for Insurance agents? If not, why not? Does being a financial planner entail higher expertise than insurance agent, or vice versa? Share your thoughts here!
Hi, glad to see this place up and running again!!
thanks qwerty - we're improving some of the features, and it takes some effort to put everything up. cheers
Financial planners, as the title implies, should be proficient in many areas of financial planning, not just limited to insurance. Insurance is just one aspect of financial planning. To call insurance agents financial planners is misleading! Financial planners should be able to introduce and/or recommend different products from different companies that can best meet one's needs/requirements. Insurance agents have limitations as they can only sell the products from the company they represent. Not forgetting there are high hidden costs that many policy holders aren't aware of!
Mrsjosiah's right. And the poll seeks a reflection of what people think of financial planners / insurance agents.
That said, the reverse case also exists. There are insurance agents that go beyond their call of duty to recommend products and provide value-added services to their customers despite being a franchisee of a single product provider.
There was an interesting article I read yest in The New Paper. Dr Money (Larry Haverkamp) suggested some ways to test an agent, to determine or rate our Financial Planners in "Is it time to get back into the stock market?" (http://www.tnp.sg/columnists/story/0,4136,-2363-1252447140,00.html?)
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Give your agent or financial planner a test and ask: 'I want to use cash to buy $100 per month of stocks. How can I do it?'
• IF he tells you that a unit trust with a regular savings plan is your best bet, give the planner an 'A' grade.
• IF he recommends a regular premium ILP but discloses that sales charges are high compared to single premium ILPs and unit trusts, give him a 'C' grade.
• IF he recommends a regular premium ILP and doesn't even mention the unit trust option, give him an 'F' grade and drop him immediately.
We have 13,000 agents and 2,000 financial planners in Singapore. I suspect that more will fail this test than pass. Test your Agent today!
PS: There was one who spoke to me at the Bank today, he got an "Ungraded" coz he quickly pushed me to use that money to buy other products he was trying to selling. Tsk tsk~