Are you being sold financial products through fear tactics?

Tune in today to learn how to protect yourself.

It's Brian Preston, the money guy, restoring order to your financial chaos, retirement, investing, taxing.

You've got financial questions, he's got financial answers.

It's Brian Preston, the money guy.

Bo, one of my biggest pet peeves is that I feel like a lot of the financial industry sells their products, not off their merits, not off the research,

by how they can scare the heebie-jeebies out of you to buy their products.

So the more fear you can induce in your customers, consumers, clients, the more profitable you can be. That's kind of the mantra.

I think it's a manipulation tactic. They know if they make you fearful of things, because people, us as humans, we have this big propensity to fight or flee, that we remember bad decisions.

We remember bad things that have happened to us, so if they can appeal to that, it makes the products more likely to be purchased.

That's the big thing, and in full disclosure, I feel like when you have these type of topics, you speak in very broad terms, but there's a good chance that there are times you should be fearful.

We talk about on shows all the time. If you have children and you do not have wills, and we don't know what your desires are for who's going to take care of the kids, after something happens, guide help you, something happens to both of you, that is something you should be fearful.

You should think about that. On the same token, I recognize every one of the products, I'm going to be talking about today, there is a place in certain people's financial life for these products.

What I worry about though is if you looked at the numbers of the people who are buying the products versus the people that fit those very specialized situations, I don't know if they always line up.

I think that there's a broader population being sold these products versus asking the why do I need this type of product. That is the key takeaway, as we go through each of these is understanding the why.

I mean, a capital Y, W, H, Y, should I buy this?

I think what we're going to do is we're going to go through a number of different specific financial products and talk about why they might not fit in a broad structure, why they indeed should be specialized.

So let's jump right in. We've got a few of these so a lot of waste time. The first one, equity index denuities.

These are ones that are really interesting because I feel like we saw a lot of these 10 years ago. They kind of went away for a while to an extent and I feel like now they've come back where we're seeing them a lot more frequently now.

You know why is because we know bear markets or recessions, they're supposed to occur every six, seven, eight years. We've now gone practically a decade since we've had the big great recession that occurred in 2008 and 9.

So I think people are just kind of anticipating that hey, we're due for a downturn. In case you don't know equity index denuities, I think about the whole ratchet. That's what they always give that the ratchet is a pin.

But you know how a ratchet will tick tick tick tick but you can't pull it back down because that's the way equity index annuities are sold is that they will guarantee that when markets are going up, you get to lock in the up.

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