Two of my former colleagues at work headed down a different path career-wise and chose to become financial advisors. As I understand it, that's their plan to get out of the rat race, or at least it gets them out of the drudgery of a 9 to 5 and cubicles (at least, once lockdowns are over and we all get back to office spaces). As someone who's supportive of their chosen path, I let them book me an online appointment with them, thinking that, hey, I might get to know of new products worth putting money into. At the very least, they can practice their spiel with me and iron out kinks before they do the same for people they don't personally know, a much tougher ask in terms of selling products.
So we talked about the usual stuff, bond funds, money markets, equities, insurance options (as an aside, this is the key product they're selling). We had an overall pleasant talk, even though none of the funds offered piqued my interest so far. It's all good, they really just wanted the upsell reps more than sales at this point.
Then I broached the topic of cryptocurrencies, what they know about it, what their recommendations were. They pretty much struggled with that one, not really having done any dive into it, just a cursory reading on what it is.
To be fair, they were honest about it instead of feeding me half-truths and guesses, but a missed opportunity in my book. In today's economy, any financial advisor that's keen on maximizing a client's portfolio should at least read up on cryptocurrencies. Not that they necessarily have to recommend putting money into it, just knowing about it well enough to get their clients up to speed on where the crypto market is, especially when some moves in fiat markets have an impact in the crypto space, leading to possible gains in the latter. It's just about doing due diligence at this point.
I'm not fashioning myself to be a crypto expert, far from it. There's a reason why I frequent Publish0x, because far better crypto minds than me give me insight with their articles. I would hope that financial advisors, too, are able to brief me on this space if asked (or even if I didn't). One who does so certainly raises my opinion of them as they would show that they're up to speed with ways to grow wealth, and isn't that their job in the first place?
