Please stay tuned for important disclosure information at the conclusion of this episode.

Many investors work with a financial advisor to help them reach retirement or college savings goals,

but the client advisor relationship, like any relationship, may not last long.

Morningstar researchers have explored why people fired their financial advisors.

And it's more complicated than fees.

Morningstar Inc.'s senior behavioral researcher Sam Llamas and Morningstar Inc.'s behavioral

scientist, Dr. Danielle Labaka, are joining the podcast.

So you all ask people why they decided to stop working with their financial advisor. Danielle, what kind of responses did you

guys get back? Yeah, so we asked this in a way that let people give us open-ended responses

that they could write out. And that's kind of nice because it means that people

are telling us what they thought in their own words as opposed to checking a box based on something

we wrote. But the downside to it is that we kind of get a lot of variation in our answers. Some of

them are really short and you have people saying two words like too expensive. But other people give a whole

story about their financial situation and why it changed and why that meant that their advisor was

no longer right for them. So in order to handle all this different kind of data, what we do is

create a way of categorizing them into different subsets of information based on what we find

about what people think about firing their advisor from both the academic and industry literature.

So the responses varied a lot and they fell into different categories. Sam, what were the six

most common reasons why people fired their advisors?

Yeah, it was actually fascinating to see how people's responses and their reasons for

firing varied. But the six most common were actually quality of financial advice and services.

So the person had a problem with the specific services the advisor was providing, quality

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