How to get free financial planning advice

I've given my reasons why I don't like to use financial planners. But if you can get some free financial advice, why not take advantage? By investing enough money with some financial services companies, they'll provide either one-time or ongoing financial planning. I plan to do a series of posts on this topic. I'll start with the mutual fund companies in general, and with American Century Investments in particular. All information is from the company Web site.

American Century Investments

Program Name: Priority Investor

Assets Needed: $500,000

Type of advisor: Dedicated representative that will provide personal guidance

Frequency of advisements: Semiannual

Fee benefits: No account maintenance fees, IRA custodial fees orAmerican Century Brokerage Access account fees. $10 off per trade in an American Century Brokerage account.

URL: https://www.americancentury.com/ivs/benefits.jsp?source=info/pi_benefits

One final note on fees. American Century says that it charges a $12.50 semiannual account maintenance fee to investors whose total investments are less than $10,000 for each taxpayer identification number. The fee is waived if the accounts are managed online. Now, if you are investing $500,000 with them, you would obviously qualify, but I want to point out that American Century waives this fee if total investments with them across accounts (one fund per account) are greater than or equal to $10,000. Some mutual fund companies don't look at total combined investments but instead assess fees to each individual account. For example, you could have $28,000 invested with a fund company across 7 accounts, with $4,000 in each account. If that fund company assessed a fee on individual accounts with balances with less than $5,000, fees would be assessed even though the total of all accounts was more than $5,000.

Merging private banks

The world of private banking is where presumably resides the best financial advice possible. Here are a couple of stories (free WSJ Digg link) on the acquisition of U.S. Trust by Bank of America (free WSJ Digg link). The first article ranks of private banks by assets under management. JPMorgan Chase is first at $258 billion, then Bank of America at $172 billion, Northern Trust at $135 billion, Citibank at $100 billion and U.S. Trust, which Bank of America is acquiring, at $93 billion.

Bank	Assets
JPMorgan Chase	$258 billion
Bank of America	$172 billion
Northern Trust	$135 billion
Citibank	$100 billion
U.S. Trust	$93 billion

The second article talks about how Bank of America is getting rid of the old tiers of $3 million for its private client service and $50 million for its private bank and combining them into one operation. It should be interesting to watch this merger.

Why I love the WSJ

I love The Wall Street Journal. I like it not just for its financial news, but also for stories like this (free WSJ Digg link). At least twice a week, it runs great stories like this that have nothing to do with finance, but that are absolutely engrossing. For other sites/authors I visit/read see the right side of the page.

Do you trust TripAdvisor's reviews?

Here's a travel post. I've been meaning to write about this article in the Journal on how accurate TripAdvisor is in its reviews (free WSJ Digg link). A good example from the story:

But on a trip in January my family discovered that some people who write reviews on TripAdvisor.com are thrilled to pay $280 to spend the night next to an eight-lane highway. Ranked on the Web site as the No. 1 property in Carlsbad, Calif. -- ahead of the Four Seasons Aviara and the famous La Costa spa -- the West Inn & Suites wasn't only far from the center of the quaint oceanside town, it was also next to a working train track with a view of a large power plant.

The article goes on to talk about how important it is to study each review and the reviewer who wrote it. Carefully look at reviews that differ greatly from the average review given. Check out the reviewer to see if she is a frequent review writer, and the types of reviews she gives. Do this by clicking on the reviewer's name to see a list of her reviews. It's possible to even send her a message through the site. Get to a reviewer's profile page by going to http://www.tripadvisor.com/members/membername.

Having lived in New York for many years, my favorite quote in the article was this:

The reviewer's hometown can count even within the U.S. Bob McDevitt (whose screen name is Cap10Bob), doesn't believe anything written by a New Yorker. The 58-year-old salesman from Boston says "people from there wouldn't like anything anyway."

I haven't used TripAdvisor to plan a vacation, but I have been comparing the reviews on it to my own experiences (kind of like Monday morning quarterbacking). The reviews of the hotel where I've stayed in Aruba were pretty accurate. A few years ago I spent some time in Argentina and after reading the reviews of the hotels I stayed in, I'd say they were also on target.

The article also recommends some other sites to use to get reviews, including fodors.com, gusto.com, hotelshark.com, igougo.com and zoomandgo.com. For the Caribbean, I personally like debbiescaribbeanresortreviews.com.