Monteith Financial Services - Stratford, Ontario

Stuart Pearson

Writing this much overdue review as our experience with this organization was very sub-optimal for a number of reasons. While other clients may have a different perspective we worked with Monteith (Stephanie) for a number of years when we were just getting established and prior to having children (our oldest is nearly 20 now) and in reflection we found that this firm really only cared about their legal compliance (e.g. ensuring that their data on our was accurate each year) vs. really helping create long term wealth. As an example when we first established an RESP after the birth of our first child, I stated that we wanted to use an aggressive growth strategy for the RESP specifically as we had a long (18 year) time horizon to deal with any interim market issues and that unlike our retirement savings if something happened as a result of us pushing to use an aggressive growth strategy we would deal with it once our kids were university age.

To make a long story short, both in this instance and in other instances our input was not considered and Monteith put us into low-growth Manulife funds (all of which were DSC funds without disclosure as to the long term cost and specific vesting terms) before this practice was outlawed by changes to government legislation. Similarly requests to invest in blue chip equities e.g. Apple and Ford at the bottom of the 2008-2009 recession again were not listened to nor were our other long term goals. We finally got smart and moved out ~3 years ago and it took until very recently to get the last of our DSC fund money out of Manulife DSC funds and worse yet the net ROI on our RESP was NEAR ZERO!!!! after 18-19 years of so called balanced growth. I know that all market investments are subject to market conditions however the bottom line is that our experience with this firm made us feel like this firm doesn't listen to its clients (at least not the smaller ones) and equally as frustrating is that despite being paid to actively manage client investments all that we saw was year after year of "stay the course" and no active management. As such our review of this firm and advisor is a solid 0/100