This was my first experience working with an advisor from a private firm that was recommended to me by someone I knew. I’m high earning on w2 and originally had some stocks/index ETFs that I wasn’t sure what to do with. I was also interested in tax loss harvesting (since then I learned recently there are lower cost alternatives). My life has been crazy over the past 2 years and I hadn’t been paying close attention to the portfolio. Today some serious red flags popped out at me:

* overall the 438k brokerage portfolio they manage is up by 141k over the past 2 years…including 135k worth of my monthly 5k cash deposits. I feel utterly devastated.

* 1.5% fee. I didn’t realize that was well beyond the market average until I did more research today

* They bought 6-7k worth of SpaceX IPO.

* When I began to doubt things, I transferred out my remaining cash to another bank and stopped my automatic deposits to the managed brokerage.…