Spit Out This Free Lunch

If you’re like me, you get frequent solicitations to attend complimentary seminars, complete with chicken dinners, to hear about new investing opportunities. While some of these seminars impart useful information, most are designed solely to scare and mislead; and that is especially true when the seminars are aimed at senior citizens.

A just-released study by AARP and the North American Securities Administrators Association, “Protecting Older Investors: 2009 Free Lunch Seminar Report,” reports that 6 million Americans age 55 or older have attended a free lunch or dinner investment seminar over the past three years. Three-quarters of them expected that the seminar would educate them about financial issues and strategies to help ensure a comfortable retirement. Instead, according to AARP’s Jean Setzfand, seminar attendees “are pitched financial products that are fraudulent or unsuitable for them.” The most commonly pitched products are variable annuities and equity-indexed annuities -- both of which pay egregiously high commissions to the salesman and are wrongly described as low-risk/high-yield investments.

To help reduce this type of abusive selling and increase awareness of fraudulent promotions, AARP has created the “Free Lunch Monitor” program and encourages individuals to report suspicious activity at the organization’s web site: www.aarp.org/nofreelunch.

For more investing insights, please check out Your Nest Egg Game Plan: How To Get Your Finances Back On Track and Create a Lifetime Income Stream by Phil Fragasso and Prof. Craig Israelsen.