Has your financial advisor, retirement account custodian or the brokerage firm where you hold your investments asked you for a “trusted contact person?” In this video, Matt Horsley, CFP® of Pure Financial Advisors explains what a trusted contact person is and how Pure Financial is helping to safeguard our clients’ finances.
Transcript:
Recently your financial advisor may have asked you to complete was called a trusted contact person form. Let’s talk about why that form is so important.
In today’s world seniors are more and more at risk of becoming victims of financial abuse and fraud. And it comes in all shapes and forms and sizes in terms of – we’ve heard of the stories of people receiving phone calls that they’ve won the lottery or a sweepstakes, but in order to claim your prize, you need to send money in, in order to receive your funds. When you hear scams all the time about how this happens – repair work on your house. Ponzi schemes. So what we want to do is help to protect our clients against those types of issues.
Part of the way we do this is have our clients complete what’s called a trusted contact person form. What that allows us to do is it gives us an individual for us to reach out and contact in the case that we can’t contact you or there’s some activity that we feel like doesn’t quite match a client’s typical behavior.
So what the form does not allow us to do is take any instructions financially from that person you’ve given the authority to. In order to do that, you need to establish what’s called a durable power of attorney for finances. So those are two separate documents. What this does is simply give you the peace of mind that if some sort of a suspicious email comes through, or a request for funds, or something that doesn’t quite seem like you, we have the ability to reach out to somebody that you trust to verify that that’s what you want to have happen. So this is just one additional step that we’re taking that you should take as well to protect yourself and your assets.
Any additional questions, give us a call or check us out at PureFinancial.com.
