Nch Tax And Wealth Advisors

I was a client of NCH Wealth Advisors from 2011 to 2017; they invested our money and prepared our taxes. Nick Hodges, the firm’s president, strongly recommended a $949,000 Prudential Annuity. At that time, we didn’t realize he collected a commission of somewhere between 4.5% on the low end, to 10% (which I believe is much more likely) on the high end. This is excessive, and Nick never told us of the enormous commission attached to this financial product. Even after that, returns would surely drag because there was a 3.6% charge per year in ongoing fees.

We had several hundred thousand dollars of other investment money that Nick put into some poorly performing and unusually expensive (SEI) funds. Nick laughed at me when I suggested moving money into funds that were in Forbes’ Honor Roll; he told me how much he knew about investing and how much experience he had.

Nick didn’t like me asking him why we had such lousy returns during the greatest bull market of my lifetime. He had zero acceptable answers, and finally we leave in the middle of 2017. We found different financial managers and different accountants.

Nick did not send us away with everything we needed for a smooth transition. My new accounting firm needed the cost basis for the funds NCH purchased for me. By that time, I wrote and published an honest review of Nick’s firm on Yelp, based entirely on years of personal experience.

Nick called me and demanded I take down my review. He never said that one word was not accurate; he simply said that I had to take it down right away. Until I did, he said, he would not give me the cost information I needed for my tax return for the expensive funds he sold me! I thought after the many tens of thousands of dollars he “earned” from my wife and me that we ha already paid to have him send me our records for the accounting services for which we paid separately.

I took down the Yelp review; being able to get my taxes completed was more important than the review. (Nick’s actions? Look in the dictionary under “blackmail”).

After I took down the review, Nick waited days before sending some (not all) of the needed information, some barely legible, some not legible at all. Too little to do me good, coming in after the tax deadline. (I ended up getting the information from the fund company.)

As a money manager firm, they charged excessively inadequate work and the investments had unsatisfactory returns.

I believe the firm should calculate the amount they charged, and at a minimum, refund the amount of their ill-gotten gain that can be attributed to excessive fees. Unfortunately, our retirement funds will forever be damaged by their recurrent decisions to purchase securities for me which appear based on the profitability to Nick and his firm, with no consideration at all if it was appropriate nor reasonable for me. They kept me from getting reasonable benefit from the current bull market.