EP 56 | Profit Boss® Radio | Financial Advice: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly with Dr. Antoinette Schoar

The federal fiduciary rule has been a hot topic in recent months, since President Obama’s decision to establish it. Now that President Trump has put the rule on hold to be reviewed, we’re all talking about fiduciary advisors and regulations once more. I came across an excellent article recently, “What Your Financial Advisor Isn’t Telling You,” by Dr. Antoinette Schoar, and I knew I had to chat with her.

Antoinette is a professor of Entrepreneurial Finance at MIT, frequent contributor to the Journal of Finance, and an integral part of the nonprofit organization ideas 42. While she’s got a mind for all things economic and financial, she’s recently been intrigued by the idea of fiduciary advisors here in the US.

In this interview, Dr. Schoar and I talk about her experiences as a professor at MIT and how she balances life and work. We then talk about the conversation with her mother and her mother’s financial advisor that made Antoinette want to better understand the difference between fiduciary- and suitability-focused advisors. We also talk best investment strategies, including the benefits of index funds and how much stock you should own of the company that employs you.

Listen To The Full Interview:

What You’ll Learn From This Episode:

• Discover what it’s like to be a professor at MIT and how Antoinette manages work/life balance.
• How ideas42 applies research from behavioral economics and other fields to real-world problems, like helping people apply for food stamps and financial aid.
• What Antoinette did when she found out her mother’s financial advisor had her investing in crazy stuff like shipbuilding. 
• The study that Antoinette and her team conducted, sending “mystery shoppers” to financial advisors to determine whether they would provide fiduciary, unbiased advice or let their clients make some serious investing mistakes.
• How to make choosing a financial advisor simple and straightforward.
• The true cost of not having a fiduciary on your side.
• Why you may want to reconsider how much stock you purchase from the company you work for. 

Featured On The Show:

• Antoinette Shoar
• ideas42
• We Put Financial Advisors to the Test – and They Failed by Antoinette Shoar in WSJ
• The Market for Financial Advice: An Audit Study by Antoinette Schoar, Sendhil Mullainathan, and Markus Noeth for the NBER
• The Role of Simplification and Information in College Decisions: Results from the H&R Block FAFSA Experiment for the NBER

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