Go find a wealth management advisor who is substantially older than you, and preferably one who is a CFA Charterholder. Tell them that for a couple years, you want to take a relatively conservative position while you study up on finance. They can help you diversify your holdings against many sorts of risks relatively easily. This isn't worth doing when you only have $50k, but when you have $5m, it's worth protecting against a lot of different possibilities.
Then, go study finance. Really study it. Full-time student. You have a huge opportunity. Don't just read a few books.
And be clear, you don't just want a CPA. You're looking for a professional firm that is devoted to the special needs of high net worth individuals. You have unusual tax, estate and banking requirements.
Madoff was a cheat since the 80s or early 90s (the date of the inception of his fraud isn't precisely known). He robbed people who were greedy or foolish.
He did so not by offering some sort of AAA product that got a few points more than treasuries, but by offering an opaque product with extremely high yield and almost no volatility. He never had a month where he lost more than 0.5%, and had net annual returns, every year, in the neighborhood of 15%.
The Fed had nothing to do with him. I'd be shocked if more than about $1.50 and a bus ticket flowed into Madoff's funds from investors who were fleeing treasuries.
Your comment tells us a lot about your predisposition to blame government first (even going so far as to directly blame them for a bad actor, and people who were fooled by the bad actor), but it's not a useful comment about the Fed at all.
DIAMONDS Trust Series 1,
iShares S&P 500 Value Index,
iShares S&P 1000 Value Index,
iShares Russell 2000 Value Index,
iShares Russell Midcap Value Index, and
Vanguard Total Stock Market.
Bonds:
iShares Barclays TIPS Bond Fund.
So not only do you get to pay them 0.9%, you also get to pay the (much more reasonable) fees charged by Vanguard and iShares.
They charge 0.9% to put the money into Vanguard and iShares ETFs.
This is not professional advice but I can't understand who needs this product. For investment, most people should be trying to max out their 401(k)/*IRA options, and the people who still have a lot of money left after doing so would likely benefit from more thoughtful investment and wealth management strategies.
If somebody needs some emergency cash, it's unlikely they want to keep it in an instrument that can lose value, since that defeats the point of emergency cash.
And frankly, if they don't want to be thoughtful, there are already products that are even easier to use. The Vanguard Target Retirement funds, as an example, require only that you pick your planned year of retirement, then the asset allocation is automatically handled for you. Added bonus: it's cheaper than betterment.
Most of the wealthier people I know have reasonably nice cars. Maybe not Zonda/Lambo nice, but Audi, BMW, MB, Infiniti, Lexus and Cadillac are the norm.
I have this on my account, and you don't need to go online to "thaw" it. The bureau calls you and asks "did you just apply for an auto loan at a Hyundai dealership in Florida?" and you reply "no, no I didn't", they say "okay, have a nice day", and that's that.
At least that's what happened when somebody tried to use my identity to buy a Hyundai in Florida.
I've only seen one legitimate point from him: that search isn't the root cause of the privacy problem.
Unfortunately instead of then admitting that it does exacerbate the issue, he then pretends that there is no issue, asserts that all FB users fully understand FB's privacy model and insults anybody who doesn't agree.
Something to think about: can you imagine a Zappo's employee arguing with concerned customers the way kmavm has?
He mocked a legitimate user concern (FB privacy confusion) with his "How do you sleep at night???" comments, in which he portrayed anybody with this concern as hysterical and irrational.
Search doesn't cause the problem (it merely exposes and exacerbates it), but it's a legitimate problem. And it's ridiculous for a FB employee to go around mocking those of us who had to talk our parents through a more than 100 click privacy-restoration process over the phone. (Especially when our parents are over 70, and not the fastest clickers in the West.)
If he wants to mock people for holding that concern, he's a troll, plain and simple.
And if you think that mocking people by putting imagined hyperbolic rhetoric in their mouth is civil and cogent, well... I suppose we have different definitions of civil and cogent.
----
edit: p.s. calling somebody a name is not an ad hominem, it's an insult. Here's a helpful example:
ad hominem: mos1 is wrong because he's an asshole.
It takes over 100 clicks to make a FB profile completely private, and the settings aren't permanent. That's clearly a business decision. You don't need to be a UX expert to understand the aggregate effects.
I can't even fathom how anybody could look at such a system and claim that the users all understand the ramifications with a straight face.
It's really insulting that you're trying to sell such an utterly asinine claim by pointing out that people sometimes overshare on twitter, in blog comments, and in line at Starbucks. The FB privacy system is broken by design.
Search just happens to offer an amusing window into content that is, in all likelihood, x% people who would overshare anyway, and 100-x% people who thought they were just talking to their friends, or friends + FoF, where x is nearly guaranteed not to be 0 or 100.
That said, HN isn't a place for trolling. I don't think anybody appreciates the way you're distorting people's concerns so that you can mock them.
You're smart enough to understand that the problem is not that 'public information is public', but rather that FB's habit of changing and hiding settings makes it hard to tell what is public. As such, your entire rant was not just off-topic, it was an insult to everyone with a valid concern, and every single member of the HN community who would be interested in a legitimate conversation.
So please... troll elsewhere. We don't need your kind here. This is supposed to be a place of discussion, not a place where angry FaceBook engineers insult FaceBook users with a barrage of irrelevant bullshit.
Your argument would be a lot more plausible if Facebook didn't have a habit of resetting peoples privacy settings, and if those settings were clearly, easily and permanently settable.
As it stands, I can only presume your defensiveness and your obviously nonsensical comparisons to twitter (a system where everyone knows that everything is truly public) make me think you know, deep down, that your employer has made some bad decisions.
I'm curious: does facebook train their employees to identify themselves as employees then to rail angrily and arrogantly at people who have privacy concerns, or is that your own initiative? Either way I'm unsurprised by it. Facebook seems like the sort of place where such utterly unprofessional behavior would be the norm.
Facebook: unilaterally changing your privacy settings then berating you and making disingenuous comparisons when you get upset about it since 2004.
I use my iPad differently than I use my laptop, and my desktop. I use it in instances where I wouldn't have used either the laptop or the desktop. I like it. If I didn't like it, I would've sold it.
I don't really care whether you want one or not. But it's really sad that you can't recognize that the set of things that are worth $x to you is not the same as the set of things that are worth $x to others, and have to instead make better-than-thou proclamations about a reality distortion field.
My car is better than yours, my editor is better than yours, my favorite trilogy is better than yours, and your favorite band sucks.
I played tennis quite well in high school and college. I never tried to go pro. Does that mean the tennis teams failed?
I swam competitively in college. I didn't try for the olympics. Does that mean the swim team failed?
There are a lot of valuable lessons one can pull from a business plan competition even if you don't become a founder, or even if you never intend to become a founder.
CarWoo doesn't serve my area (I checked recently, since I just bought a new vehicle), but I definitely view dealership filtering as a positive. I don't want to do business with somebody who consistently ranks poorly in satisfaction surveys.
That said, I'd appreciate if there was some copy, somewhere in a FAQ, explaining what they mean by that.
Then, go study finance. Really study it. Full-time student. You have a huge opportunity. Don't just read a few books.
And be clear, you don't just want a CPA. You're looking for a professional firm that is devoted to the special needs of high net worth individuals. You have unusual tax, estate and banking requirements.