June 20, 2019

Episode 51: Ellen Roseman: Writing About Money: Advocating for Consumer Rights

June 20, 2019

On the Rational Reminder today we are joined by Ellen Roseman from The Toronto Star, who has been writing and working in the realm of Canadian personal finance and consumer rights for many years. We have a great chat about her work history, what has driven her career and what motivates her to continue to pursue her path of creating financial awareness for more people. We discuss the position of advocacy for consumer rights and how that translates into her everyday work, her most important and recent areas of action, the classes she is involved in teaching and her most recent book, titled Fight Back. Ellen weighs in on the topics of financial advice and how to seek out the best of it, actively managed funds and how she is involved FAIR Canada. We finish off with a fun bit about how Ellen found herself blocked on Twitter by Suze Orman and Dave Ramsey! For all this and more, listen in today!

Key Points From This Episode:

What it means to Ellens to be an advocate for consumer rights. [0:02:43.1]
The most recent cause that Ellen has been championing through her work. [0:05:4]
Three tips from Ellen's most recent book, Fight Back. [0:07:59.0]
The class Ellen teaches at UFT, Investing for Beginners. [0:14:18.9]
Ellen's attitude towards seeking advice and when it is necessary. [0:16:19.6]
Bad investment advice and the cases that crop up the most for Ellen. [0:18:18.5]
Some of the results of Ellen's course and how it is laid out. [0:21:05.4]
Are actively managed mutual funds still holding the majority of Canadian assets? [0:26:03.2]
A little about FAIR Canada and Ellen's work there. [0:27:55.4]
Ellen's recent Twitter activity which led to get her getting blocked by Suze Orman. [0:32:14.5]
A definition of success from our wonderful guest! [0:38:14.0]
And much more!

Read the Transcript:

Happy to have you join us. I’ve followed your work for many years and appreciate all that you’ve done for so long and our first question for you is, on your website, you refer to yourself as an advocate for consumer rights. Can you tell us what does that mean to you?

I went to university in the late 60s and I wrote for the McGill Daily, that was my journalism training and when I graduated, I remember going to an interview where I was trying to figure out what to do net. I got a master’s in philosophy which came after that. But then, I had to find a job. Somebody said, "Who do you admire most?" And I said, "Ralph Nader." That was at peak of his rusty cars and Pintos exploding and that kind of thing. I fell back on the journalism even though I didn’t have a degree, I got into business journalism.

I discovered the consumer movement when it was still quite active in Canada, all the governments had active ministers giving money to consumer groups and there was a consumer’s association. Over the years, I covered a lot of causes that then became reality and I was just looking back on some of them. The first one I guess was the fact that when your RSP matured at age 71 or maybe it was 69, the government changed it a couple of times, there was no other alternative but putting it into an annuity with a life insurance company.

You handed it all over to them and they doled it out for the rest of your life at whatever the prevailing interest rate was. A guy in [inaudible]called Tom Delany, who sold insurance thought, you need more choice and he started leading marches and I covered him and eventual result, not me because he got some coverage but I think I was one of the early people, was that we now have the registered retirement income fund which is self, directed and which you can invest in whatever you like.

Now some people are saying annuities have a bad wrap, maybe you should have half a risk and half annuity. That was a big deal, there was the TFSA, there were some papers published by a guy called Richard Shillington. An academic in Ottawa who said that the RSP wasn’t good because the income that people got, once they were retired but if they had a low income earlier, RSP income would take away from their government benefit such as the guaranteed income supplement or drug benefit plan.

He said there had to be an alternative and eventually, we got the tax free savings account. The home buyer’s plan under the RSP, I wrote a lot about that. Once the government started giving money for the RSP, the candid education savings grant, there was a big campaign to try and offer the same thing for low income people, so that was a Canada Learning Bond.

There was another piece where we had to publicize the Canada Learning Bond because a lot of people didn’t know about it. Group scholarship plans, there’s a whole bunch of things and a lot of it is, kind of, it’s not only helping people who were aware and already able to enforce their rights or you know, their skills as a consumer. It’s helping those who have little knowledge or awareness as consumers and often don’t have the ability to get benefits that they should be getting. And working at the Toronto Star is a great place because that’s all about trying to create more social justice.

You were able to galvanize support for these various causes?

Well, helping, I don’t read all the newspapers across Canada but there were certainly things that I wrote about quite a lot.

That’s fascinating. Those are all things – the things that you mentioned or all things that I take for granted because they’ve always been there as long as I’ve been thinking about this stuff. Are there any big things like that, that you’re fighting for now? Whether you're writing about now?

The most recent one I guess was the expiry of reward points just because they’ve been around for certain amount of time and you being financial guys, you understand that these companies don’t like having liabilities on their books for too long because they don’t know what it’s ultimately going to cost.

That was their argument and consumers bought it for a while, they did like it but then Air Miles which is owned by an American company, they said, five years ahead that they were going to expire all the points after five years and then when the five years started to get close, they stop communicating. They were just not telling anybody, they were hoping I guess to attrition that they’d all be gone.

There was a role for the media to get in there and tell people, better use those points before you lose them. Then, I started up, a change.org petition and pushed that. Usually, journalist, I don’t do this kind of thing but it really bothered me and got I don’t know, a few thousand signatures and another blogger Rob Engen who also writes for the Toronto Star, Boomer and Echo is his blog. He started fighting it.

We got such a buzz out there that on Ontario MPP, who also was starting to get some complaints from his people, put forward a private member’s bill and Ontario threatened legislation to outlaw the expiry of points for no other reason than it’s been a certain amount of time that they’ve been on the books. Just the threat of that caused Air Miles to back right down and the whole thing was lifted about months before it was set to expire.

It was really exciting. I had been asked to go to CBC and talk on Facebook Live to the host of Marketplace about this. We didn’t know that the company was about to change its policy. It put out a very abrupt press release and it did it while we were in the middle of our interview. Somebody rushed in with the paper and we were both like stunned, it got all our reaction, it was really fun.

Wow. That’s neat. Your most recent book which was 2013, right?

That was called Fight Back — 81 Ways to Help You Save Money and Protect Yourself from Corporate Trickery. There are 81 tips in there, I guess. Can you give us like the top three, your favorite three?

Yes, the first one and it probably is the most popular because everyone has this phone and internet and TV and they have a plan, usually with one of the top three telecom providers. If you want to pay less, call and ask to pay less and I spoke to an expert who says, I call it creative whining 101. As simple as it sounds, if you want to pay less for a phone or TV or internet, call your provider and say, "Before I make a move to a less expensive supplier, I’d like to be sure I’m getting the best deal possible on my services.

If you’re polite and courteous and you ask them, my advice is always to say, "How long have I been with you anyway?" Because they’ve got the records and sometimes you're surprised when I ask Rogers had said 1979 and then usually the answer after that is, "I wasn’t even born then."

They recognize that loyalty and they know that if they start losing loyal customers, that isn’t a good thing because new customers that they attract will be gone as soon as the benefits are gone and they find a cheaper deal somewhere else. You could usually get pushed up to the next level which is a loyalty and they’ll try and keep you and if that doesn’t happen on that call, just hang up and try again and see if it’ll happen that time. Usually it works.

I need to call Rogers for my own service, the guys said kind of off the cuff. You know, you should call us every year and do this, right? I made a note in my calendar to call back every year on the anniversary to do exactly what you’re suggesting.

That’s great advice, because a lot of people are doing that and the ones who are missing out are the people who are either intimidated, hate bargaining or just don’t know or are older or – but the younger savvy consumers, they’ll probably do it every six months. Maybe even every three months.

Okay, the second one is, when you travel, make sure that all your travel documents are in order. I get so many stories about people who — I’ve seen it about them where they forget that their passport has expired or is just about to expire because you often can’t travel even if your passport is valid, if it’s within two months or three months of expiry. Make sure that it’s not damaged, at one point air Canada was refusing everyone who had some water damage on their passport. Saying that that wasn’t workable.

Make sure you have the right visa, some companies require visas, there was somebody who lost a giant trip because they were going to Thailand I think and nobody told them that Thailand needed a visa and so they went to airline, they went to the travel agency, they went to their travel insurance, nobody would cover it. Make sure that you have the health insurance if you have it from work, have the information about the provider written down, have the cad, make sure that if something happens, it’s easy to access. If you buy travel insurance, make sure it’s the right kind and it covers what you need to cover.

Somebody just got in touch with me from Greece, she was there with her elderly father. He had bought travel insurance, he told him he had a heart condition, it was an existing condition he paid more. Had a heart attack in Greece. Number one, the family couldn’t get a hold of the broker or the travel insurance provider, it was very hard to reach them and number two, the broker actually said, "I don’t want to tell the travel insurance company because if they hear that I’m making a claim, they might not want to sell me anymore travel insurance." Crazy stuff.

Eventually, we did get through but they’re still waiting to hear and then I checked with another broker who specializes in this stuff and he said that a lot of policy that requires your condition to be stable for 180 days outside six months and he said, "That’s a very stiff condition if you have heart problem," it means that you can’t change your medication to start, stop any of that stuff, have a test even and he’s thinking, if only somebody had helped them buy the travel insurance, they might have bought a better policy.

Okay, the third one is, how to fight back when a store refuses to give you a refund. This is so common both with physical stores and online stores, they’re now making it really tough to get refunds. I’ll mention a company that was a real stock market dialing for a while Dollarama. They don’t give refunds or exchanges or returns. They put it on the screen of the cash register as you're going out. But that’s about all the notice that you get and it’s on the bill but you’ve already paid for it.

The managers, because it’s not a franchise, it’s a company owned operation don’t have much latitude in terms of giving refunds. Okay, well, if you change your mind, if you have buyer’s remorse, that’s one thing. Stores are allowed to maintain a no refund policy. But if you buy something that doesn’t work and its obvious right away that it doesn’t work, you know? A light bulb, a battery.

Somebody told me once that her husband was a chef and he bought a measuring cup and he took it home and he realized the measurements weren’t right. A lot of this stuff comes from China, maybe it doesn’t always work that well. When Dollarama’s managers or store staff say sorry no reasons, that’s the end of it. I started looking online, every other cheap store has their policy online, Dollarama doesn’t. I go to their website, there’s nothing there about refund policy. Nothing.

No returns or anything. Then I hear from some clients that they wrote to the head office and once they got in touch with the head office, they were sent a $10 gift card in the mail. Dollarama gift card. When I spoke to their PR person, they said, "Well, yes, we do that," but nobody was telling them. Remember too that to get this gift card, you had to snap a photo of your product, you had to snap a photo of the receipt and send it electronically to the head office.

Not every dollar store customer has the ability to do that. I just didn’t like this whole policy. Some companies like Amazon, especially if they have Amazon Prime, you can send it, you can promptly send it back, no big issue but a lot of stores are now saying things like don’t bother us if your machine doesn’t work, go lot the manufacture and you’ll be covered under the warranty. Not always the case and you can’t get a refund.

I think that stores are making it tough and they’re not telling people their legal rights under the sale of goods act that you’re supposed to have something that works for the purpose for which it was intended.

Yeah, that’s interesting. Not something that I thought much about but makes a lot of sense. You teach to continue education at UFT, right?

I’m curious, how do you teach people on the – as far as investing goes on the active versus passive decision?

My class is called Investing for Beginners. I’ve been doing it for over 10 years. At the beginning, it was more about mutual funds are too expensive, that was the part where everybody started to realize that you know, that heavy cost of the MER two and a half percent a year was taking away from their returns that they were paying through the MER for advice that they maybe weren’t getting from the seller.

The intermediary and then the advice was more like, go on to Morningstar, go on to fund library, look for the best funds and the lowest cost spends and it was read the fun facts documents which started to come in. The ETF came later and sure, the banks had their own index mutual funds but they were higher priced and once the ETF started coming in, then it becomes easy to tell people, there’s an alternative that if you don’t have to get the lowest cost mutual fund but you can get an even lower cost that matches the market that you're interested in.

You have the Canadian Couch Potato Blog and you could follow that advance but since then, it’s become easier even but more complicated too because there’s so many options. You can put together, you can do the robo-advisor route which is convenient but cost a little more but they rebalance for you and then now they have the low cost all in one ETF’s. Vanguard, Beemo and Black Rock all have these really low cost balance ETF’s. All you need is one product that can do all the work for you.

It’s become a lot easier but for the average person who doesn’t think much about investing and if they do think it’s hard, a complicated and full of math, when you give them too many options, their brain starts to go like what do I do now? Sometimes you have paralysis.

How do you teach that your answer to that question leads perfectly into the next question which is, with all this choice, even though there are a bunch of really easy ways to invest some index funds, how do you teach people to think about when they should seek advice versus try and do things on their own?

I talk a lot about the fact that number one, that they are paying for advice when they have mutual funds. The sellers are often pretty good at disguising it because it’s in the fund facts document but they’re not necessarily telling you that they’re getting this trailing commission every year to pay for advice.

I always think of it as like going to a restaurant and finding out that there’s a built in gratuity of 15, maybe 18% a year and you had no choice. At least in the restaurant, it’s usually as close to you in advance so you can demand good service. But for mutual fund people, they don’t know what they’re paying so they don’t demand the service that they should be getting and often, they’re content with the once a year phone call to find out if they’re putting money into the RSP.

That kind of advice isn’t that useful and a lot of people take my course are fed up with their mutual funds because they’re not growing, they feel that they’re not getting anywhere with their retirement plans. When you ask them about the service, they feel that there isn’t much there. I talk about maybe you need a more holistic kind of advice, maybe go to a financial planner that can look at your cash flow, your insurance, your estate planning, your taxes and give you advice about all those things.

Not cheap mind you, a lot of people don’t like to pay the full cost of financial planning but I’m not always a fan of growing the financial planning for free, as long as you buy products from the company that you're dealing with. On our podcast that I do with Lana Sanichar of Canadian MoneySaver, it’s the MoneySaver Podcast, we interviewed Rona Beeranbaum who is a full service financial planner and fund seller and she started at an online financial plan, kind of like a robo-financial plan called Viva Plan and they charge $799 which is bringing the cost down and making it more a affordable for people to get that kind of advance.

Thinking of advice Ellen, you must get a ton of complaints about bad investment advice?

Yes, probably the biggest complaint and I think it’s universal because I see it all the time, people always asking about is leveraging a good strategy? I think the average public doesn’t really know or care about it until their friendly mutual fund seller comes along.

Usually they're licensed only to sell mutual funds and the big tactic is always to say, "You know, if you’ve paid of part of your house, you don’t even need to pay that mortgage but that’s a benefit. Even if you’ve paid up part of the house, that equity sitting in the house is dead equity, it’s doing you no good at all, it’s just sitting there useless. Why not take it out and buy mutual funds and hold them over a number of years and eventually the mutual funds will far surpass the cost of the interest that you’ve paid and you’ll be all set."

Now, I’m not saying that leveraging is a bad strategy, sophisticated investors have made a lot of money with going into debt but for the average investors who are approached by these people, it’s very difficult for them because when times are good, they don’t mind paying the interest. When times are bad, they’re stressing their funds go down and they are even more distressed paying interest on the loan to buy funds that are going down and they feel like the downturn is never going to end so they sell out at the bottom.

It’s really not fair that so many of the sellers are – some of the companies that are out there use a — leverage a pitch with who every they’re dealing with. It’s just kind of like the modus operandi, everybody is told to do this or asked to do this and it’s up to the clients to say yes or now. Unless you’ve done it, you don’t realize how scary it is to go through a downturn with your funds and your investment loan.

So that’s the worst I think but there’s a lot of other ones too. There is a lot of like, “This is complicated. I will just give you the very basic idea of what you’re doing.” Remember principle protected notes, that was like a GIC. It was just like a GIC only when the market crashed in 2008 did people find out that the principle protection was detached from the stock market investment because it couldn’t do it that way and they had to hold on for 10 years even though they are getting GIC like returns.

So you know there is such a role for the media to be able to tell people what those other guys aren’t telling you. The downside, the potential downside or the risk because every seller I always looking at the bright side, the most optimistic scenario. So I hope through that media people are getting to read the other scenario that might really trap them.

I want to come back to your continuing education course for a second. When you are teaching that how many cohorts do you go through a year? How many people are you teaching?

The fall course gets an average of about 50 people and they’re all ages and all stages. Some of them are quite young too, it is really nice to see. I had a high school student once do it. And I work with another UFT instructor to do an all-day course. So we try to condense it all into a weekend, either a Saturday or a Sunday for eight hours and give them a lot of information. We are now thinking that maybe because last time somebody walked out at noon and she said, “My head is swimming with too much information.”

Maybe we’ll do it half a day on the weekend for two days in a row but people know that they need this information and it is really nice to see them and because these other instructor and I are both women, we get a fair number of women. The last time around we had 16 people all were women. It was the first time ever that we had an entirely female audience, which we don’t market for or solicit. I think every woman in Canada is realizing you can’t leave it to the male in your life. You are likely to outlive them and your approach might be different from your partner’s approach.

So why not some of the women who take the course are saying, “Well we have always been dealing with this investment advisor that my husband picked but I am not so comfortable. So I want to figure out what I am going to do and find my own advisor.”

So is the result of that that you end up creating better clients for advisors or do they become do it yourselfers or do they go to robos? What is the end solution that you see them walking away with?

It is hard because we don’t keep track of them after. We hear from them often on, some of them do it themselves but that is fairly complicated. I always think that it is only hard at the beginning like opening up that discount brokerage account. It takes a lot of time, there’s all of these documents you have to sign and once you start trying to pick things and you push the button and you are executing an order that’s scary.

But once you used to it and I do it myself and it all becomes routine after a while. So there is a do it yourself route, which probably is a minority. There are some people who come, want to stay with their advisors but they want to ask their advisors better questions. Well this is a great outcome. They are not going to let their advisors get away with “I have it all in hand. Don’t worry the market always goes up,” we now know about those conversations where the advisors are so arrogant.

By watching those [inaudible] commercials on TV, it has been going on for years and you could see how the client feels sometimes when the advisor tries to brush them off. And then there is the third one where people will go to the robo and that’s the easiest and we actually stress that. If somebody is a beginner, doesn’t have the time, feels like they are wasting a lot of their precious years by investing in low interest products, go to the robo.

It is simple, it’s convenient, you can’t go wrong. There is 15 to choose from, probably they will get consolidated at some point, probably the banks are going to take over a few. They are already looking I think and a couple of banks have started their own. So that is the best route and if all we do is just explain what a robo-advisor does and how they can benefit from it that’s the first step and maybe after that, they will move on to something more complicated.

Interesting. Can you pinpoint like you are delivering this course to a ton of people and it sounds like they’re all pretty engaged, is there a common light bulb that goes off? Is there one topic where everyone is like, “Oh no I get that.”

There certainly is and it takes a while to talk about how mutual funds get you in the end. You know first of all there is the different sales chart. I am now teaching a course at the Ryerson LIFE Institute to older adults and I was doing the investing piece yesterday and I also have Larry Bates who has written a book called Beat the Banks and he spoke to them and so I showed them the typical DSC schedule over seven years and you can see how it starts at 5.5%.

And it goes down ever so slowly and it just takes forever to get to the end of it and they are taking a big chunk of your proceed and how many people hold onto their mutual funds for seven years? Some do, some don’t. Often the advisors are the ones that churn them or that they keep giving them new funds during that period so that they start the DSC schedule all over again and this was a never consumer friendly measure and then at the end of it, we tell the students the securities regulators in Canada had agreed, which takes forever, that they will get rid of the DSC as not a consumer friendly measure.

And then Ontario under their new DSC government decided to throw a wrench in the works and saying, “We are not going along with it. We like the current status quo.” So lucky the DSC seems to be dying out as I pointed out, investors groups, which is the king of the DSC sellers, they got rid of it two years ago but everyone else who has their funds from before January 2017 they are still paying those DSC’s and they are not retroactive.

Based on the data that we have from I think two publishers at Morningstar, publishes the data on where are Canadian fund assets and they are still mostly an actively managed mutual funds. Is that what you see from the sample that you give your students or are they mostly an actively managed mutual funds?

Yes though it’s gotten so complicated that people rarely know what they have. Even the names, the names aren’t so well-known. Templeton used to be a well-known name but they are not as prominent as they used to be. So people know that they have funds. Sometimes they are bank funds so it is the branding they don’t know, the type of fun they don’t know and then you get into things like I said, the A or the B or the C.

There are so many different initials that they can’t even go online and look to see which fund they have and whether or not Morningstar gives it four stars or three stars or five stars because they don’t know which kind they have. So it is complicated but I think that what people know is they have a relationship with someone who they probably been dealing with for quite a while, usually in the fall or in the spring when the RSPC happens maybe during the tax season and they forget about it for six months.

And then they come back again and as long as that relationship seems to be pretty good and as long as they have been getting some regular mailings about their investments then it is fine. They don’t know really how to compare their returns. The regulator said, “Okay, let us do some kind of acquirement every year that they get a dollars and cents summary of what they are paying the advisor and a performance.” Their individual performance not the fund performance.

So it is on a statement that they get once a year but how many people read the statements? I heard from a bunch of people including one who works in the industry that he just puts it in a drawer and leave it there all year and then takes it out once a year, put them all together. So it is not the most happy thing that people do is reading statements and maybe the statements aren’t as well designed as they could be.

So you are co-chair I believe of FAIR Canada, correct?

And that is the Foundation for the Advancement of Investor Rights. Can you talk about what FAIR would mean to our listeners and what you are hoping to achieve?

FAIR was founded by Ermanno Pascutto who used to be head of the Ontario Securities Commission and he felt that whenever the securities regulators wanted to consult the public about whether the rules needed changing that they would put out a call for submissions and 99.9% of the submissions were from the industry written by lawyers, fairly technical and there might be 0.1% from consumers and they were often a consumer who bought into a bad deal with an advisor and was complaining about that.

He felt that there was a rule for an advocacy group that would speak for the investing public as a whole and would be financed by the industry or by the regulators. From the regulators, from the fine money that they collect because in Canada you can’t use that fine money that you get from companies to finance your operations as a regulator because that is seen as a conflict of interest. So it started with money from the regulators and lately, we’ve had some money from IIROC.

And also from Steven Jaroslawski's foundation, he is a member of our board and he is a longtime portfolio manager and we’ve been making submissions to the regulators for a number of years. Some have gone through such as the fun facts document and CRM too but others are stalled. The best interest standard, which is like the fiduciary duty, the regulators have backed off. They want to use more targeted reforms and then the embedded commissions.

Which is the trailing commissions that are paid by the managers to the people who sell the funds. We see that as a conflict of interest and we’ve said it many times but that again seemed stalled. So now we are rethinking because so much of the work has gone to try and persuade the regulators and we are not getting that far with it. We are trying to go more public like CBC go more public and really tell investors that we are there. We are there to help them. We want to get their support and do more that is pitched at the investor’s level of knowledge because our submissions also tend to be that quite technical.

What do you think the impact of a best interest standard would be?

I know that there are some issues because for example, I was talking about people who are licensed to sell mutual funds by the MFDA. If they had a best interest standard, would they have to tell the customer, “All I sell are mutual funds. So if you want to buy and sell stocks or individual bonds, I can’t sell them to you and that may not be in your best interest. Maybe you should go down the street if that is what you really want.”

Right now they’ll just say, “Who wants to buy individual stocks and bonds? You are not diversified. It is not good for you. We are much better because we are diversifying you and we have professional managers,” and they leave the impression often with people that a mutual fund will protect you from market down turns, which is far from the case. So it could really derail the industry if it is currently constituted but here’s the thing.

Most investors in Canada, there had been many, many surveys, believe that anyone who is selling them financial products usually aimed at retirement or at meeting their life’s goals have a legal duty to put the client’s interest ahead of the advisor’s interest and they are very surprised when told, “No that is not the case.” Except for a few categories of clients that are profoundly unable to fight for themselves and there is an imbalance of power.

But if you are an average person, you’re supposed to be responsible for making your own decisions and even if you are misled by the advisor that is your fault. People don’t like hearing that and we have to address that gap because if they get turned off by a bad experience, they are probably never going to come back in and it means eventually that the federal government is not involved in security’s regulation. It’s left to the provinces.

The federal government is the one that pays out the old age security and is responsible for Canada Pension Plan and if they found out later that a new generation of retirees does not have financial security because of the way these mutual funds are sold to people and the returns aren’t there, they’re going to have to worry about maybe we have to make it fairer for the individual consumer to get the advice that they need.

So interesting. So Ellen I have to ask you about your recent, I don’t know if it is a war or not but the recent events on Twitter where you were blocked by some pretty high profile famous personal finance people namely Suze Orman and Dave Ramsey. So they blocked you on Twitter.

Can you talk about that and what caused it? And you seem to get a whole lot of support I noticed in the Twitter feed afterwards around this.

It’s so much fun. I never had such an exciting time on Twitter. It actually started because I get that a wealth of common sense, you know that blog from the US and he had written an article about Suze Orman and about the fact that I think it was actually starting – it started about a guy called Steven A. Smith from ESPN and how he earned so much money and he was saying that when you earn a stratosphere of level of income, you know millions and millions then you become divorced from the average person because you are always traveling on a private plane and you are getting whisked away from famous hotels and you are never standing in line and your life is so different.

And then he brought that down to the level of Suze Orman and Dave Ramsey who are both superstars of personal finance in the US. Suze Orman is more or less retired but she still comes in from time to time. She retired from TV anyway and Dave Ramsey is still very active out there with a radio show. So I just retweeted it and when I retweet, I usually put a little comment on top.

I forget what my comment was, I can’t remember what my comment was but I am not sure if it is Suze Orman or Suze Orman’s assistant or Suze Orman’s robots that all of a sudden blocked me and I didn’t realize it until I went to retweet it again and then I saw that it had disappeared and just sign saying I was blocked. So I took a picture of the sign and I put it on again and oh yes. Before she blocked me, she retweeted it and said, “Worst comment ever.” So that was pretty exciting, right?

Blocking and retweeting at the same time and then I did a few other tweets and then all of a sudden, because I have started with a US guy who worked for Barry Ritholtz, we are starting to get other people from the firm because they had written some of these comments as well and then I did a Dave Ramsey thing and it took me a while to figure out that he blocked me too because he had Dave Ramsey Show, which didn’t block me and had a few different Twitter handles.

But then I noticed that the Dave Ramsey one was also blocked, so I took a picture of that and then I did a moment, my first ever Twitter moment with all the info and as a result, I think I had 9,000 Twitter followers and I went up to 10,000 within a few days. So all very exciting and kind of fun to see all of these people from the US taking interest and supporting and a lot of people feel that maybe that kind of advice and then it devolved to that whole question of, if you are a personal finance guru and you have nothing more to say about 401(k) and REIT’s and all that kind of stuff, why not just attack the daily coffee.

And start telling people if they just gave up that latte, The Latte Factor, David Bach has reissued The Latte Factor but we see acknowledges that it is not only coffee. It is looking at our bad habits but many of them including Kevin O’Leary in Canada who now is Mr. Wonderful in the US always attack that coffee and I believe that giving up coffee is not enough to make you a millionaire in retirement. You have to do a lot more than that and it is such a simplistic thing to say give up your coffee.

We talked about that on one of our recent episodes about that exact comment from Suze Orman. Now Suze Orman has 1.4 million followers on Twitter. Dave Ramsey has 900,000. You have 10,000. What do you think that says about where people are getting their financial advice?

Well broadcast is the best way to get followers because you are in people’s living rooms. They see you. Suze Orman hasn’t been on TV maybe for six or seven years but people remember her. She was on Saturday night, she has this segment that I remember called “Can You Afford It?” And people would call in and they’d say, “I want to buy a boat. How much is the boat? Oh, $20,000” and she’d say, “Girlfriend, you’re denied.” And then there was this big alarm.

So that kind of stuff is really simple. People loved it and Dave Ramsey has a radio show. I haven’t heard the radio show. I don’t know if they have it in Canada but people know him very well and he’s got a variety of things going. I recently did a thing about my column in the Star about time share ownership and the time share resellers are profiting because people can’t sell that time share once they buy it after a presentation where they are given almost no information and push to sign this kind of contract.

So the time share resellers are predatory and they know that customers are anxious to get out and they promise them everything and sign them up and they lose more money and one of them is endorsed by Dave Ramsey. So it made me realized how many tentacles he has out there.

Well you know Dave Ramsey is a big proponent of actively managed mutual funds.

That is a big part of his whole story.

Yes, I certainly remember when I started writing about it in the Star, McKenzie Financial, which was then riding high. I think it was before they were taken over. The fellow who ran it said, “An ETF is a guaranteed mediocrity and we believe that we can always beat the market. We have the best possible fund managers in Canada and we are always going to do better than any of the index product” and today, look at them. They’ve got their whole suite of index products just like most of the other fund managers.

I remember that well as well Ellen. So I have one last question for you and this has been a really fascinating journey through the financial system in Canada and I’ve appreciate all that you have done for all of these years and maybe these things that I didn’t know how involved you were so I appreciate that and I am curious, given that how do you define success?

I define success in how many people I can reach and hear back from them, “Well thank you, you opened my eyes to this. Thank you I didn’t realize this.” Like yesterday, a number of people said, “I got to get in touch with my mutual fund company. Maybe I can move it.” And then there are a lot of questions about, “How do I move it and is it hard to move it?” And we are answering all of that. So maybe a call to action for some people.

And then in the Star in the last few years I’ve been doing a lot more on trying to open the doors to people to reach big companies with their problems and when I get them to the right level of the company and the problem is a real one that is totally not being addressed by the lower level call centers and staff, I can get them their money back or get them whatever it is that they are trying to get from the company. So that is incredibly rewarding and that’s one reason I continue to do the column.

Even though I am not working full time for the Star anymore. Because it is so hard for the average person to reach large companies. And with FAIR, it is so hard for the average person to take an investment complaint to a company and expect the company to do anything about it.

So it is always an imbalance and if some problems are resolved there’s always new ones coming along. The use of technology now allows new problems that we haven’t really addressed before. Though it is a never ending fight. It is never going to be finished but at least we can see some progress along the way.