Adviser Won't Drop the Annuity Pitch After Clients Said No

A MarketWatch reader complaint details a financial adviser who keeps reintroducing an annuity product his clients have already rejected — and claims every other client took the deal.

A couple told their financial adviser they were not interested in annuities.
The adviser continued raising the product at subsequent meetings, framing it as a 'great opportunity.'
He reportedly told the clients they were the only ones among his book who had not taken it.
The clients wrote to MarketWatch's personal finance desk asking whether they should fire him.
Fiduciary disclosure rules require advisers to act in clients' interests, not in the interest of product placement.

A couple with a financial adviser told MarketWatch they had declined his pitch for annuities — once — and then watched him bring it back, meeting after meeting, with the added observation that they were, in his telling, the only clients who had passed on what he called a “great opportunity.”

The complaint, published this week on MarketWatch's personal finance desk, does not name the adviser or the firm. It does name the product class: annuities, which carry commissions that can run between 4 and 7 percent of the invested amount, occasionally higher on indexed or variable structures.

The readers asked a direct question: should they fire him?

MarketWatch's columnist noted that a fiduciary adviser is legally required to put client interests ahead of product preference, and that continued pressure after a stated refusal raises the question of whose interest is being served by the recommendation.

The adviser's claim that these two clients were the lone holdouts in his entire book was not independently verified by the publication. It was, however, the detail his clients chose to include in a letter asking whether to end the relationship.