I was just doing some online banking when I noticed that it didn’t look like Jenn or I had made our regular monthly RRSP contributions for the last few months. I dug back and found that, yup, we haven’t contributed shit since Nov ’19. Not surprisingly, that was when we switched accounts at our bank to avoid some fees, and I remember having some trouble with our investment company regarding getting this all sorted out with them. After some annoying fucking around, the investment company was finally like “yup it’s all good now.” For the next few months, I checked to make sure that nothing was coming out of our old account (since that was costing us in transaction fees and that was my primary concern) but I didn’t confirm that each of those old transactions was now coming out of the new account. Fuck.
This is not the first time I’ve been disappointed by our investment company. I don’t even know why I’m not naming them right now, I feel like I should. I mean, businesses that do a lousy job should get lousy reviews, but I dunno. I think I’m probably failing to consider some mitigating factors. Anyway, my good friend worked for this company for a while and when he was our rep, everything was great. But since he left a year or two ago, we have never been transferred to a new rep. We’ve basically just been in some kind of limbo with them where we continue to put more money into our investments, which makes the company more money, but have no one to answer our questions or help with account changes. Instead, my calls and emails have either gone unanswered or I’ve been bounced around between whoever is in the head office in Toronto and can take my call, and none of these people have been very good at actually doing what they say they will. I’ve even asked for a new rep several times, to no avail. The last time I did this, I was just given a list of their reps in BC and told to get in touch with some and see who can take me on. I thought that sounded like a fucking joke but I emailed a few anyway, and guess what, no response from any of them. How is any of this even remotely professional? I feel like a good business would have been proactive and automatically assigned a new rep to us when our last one left the company but this has been a real 3-ring circus.
“Hi, I’ll be your new investment rep.”
I’m consistently baffled by how inept so-called business professionals are. I’m sure everyone at this company has all kinds of training in business, financial and investment shit, yet they still totally suck. It’s really something else, just like the crazy dealings we’ve had with Scotiabank that I blogged about here. I realize that I have to assume some of the responsibility for my recent missed RRSP contributions but I’d say it’s only about 25% my fault — I shouldn’t need to babysit the professionals who I am paying to take care of this shit for me and make sure they don’t screw it up. For what I’m paying, I expect better.
I’ve been chewing Ben’s ear off about this stuff for a few months now, asking about online DIY investing, so I think this was the last straw for me. I think it’s finally time to take the plunge and just start doing it for myself. I’m sick of dealing with unprofessional professionals.
crimson highway 