Years ago, I started a mutual fund account at SF. I moved to another, much better run competitor and finished my career there. Anyhow, we learned this week that SF was transferring the mutual funds to Northern Trust. Oddly, if you contact SF Mutual Funds, they know precious little about what happens to the accounts once they are at Northern Trust. They don't even give the same information each time you call. It's a clown show. Does anyone know details about why this is occurring and any details. We are rolling over elsewhere, but are still interested in why this occurred. SF used to excel at how these things were managed - not very impressed anymore.
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No big change in associate funds just taking over to facilitate State Farm Bank agreement exit.
I worked as a licensed sales associate for a 2 different state farm agent for 15 yrs. Thankfully both of them contributed to my SEP. Now that I am six months away from having access to those funds State Farm is “off-loading” my retirement? I am not familiar with Northern Trust and would appreciate anybody’s input on the benefits of either leaving my SEP with them or where else I might find better return/service.
I will say that in my experience, I saw a well respected, solid company become greedy and less service oriented in order to keep up with the one 800 companies. I understand the need to some degree but felt that their integrity suffered. Got sucked into their cheerleading, RaRa, in the beginning but by the end of my tenure I saw the reality. No loyalty. Just my opinion.
Agents should have never assigned there phone numbers to the Farm.
It’s going to be tight with all new commissions majority of income.
They are pushing the MF’s and everything else to shore up the drop coming in auto and fire renewal comp, the drop in renewal comp is going to be life changing for a lot of agents. Unfourtunatly it has been on the drawing board for some time. I hope a lot of senior agents push $$$ into retirement. They didn’t hold up the annual agent security statement for nothing. Good luck
I always did and still do write life insurance for people who need it. That's fulfilling. Writing arbitrary numbers of policies to keep management happy...not so much. And I really enjoyed opening IRA's and Roth IRA's for people as a registered rep. Would have done more education planning but my customers showed little interest. Even did multiple $1mm rollovers. But when it was taken away, then reintroduced outside of State Farm, with the requirement to become an RIA....No thanks. That was literally not even something that was on the table when I was hired. Nor was it something I wanted to do.
Not all agents came on board just to be "sales people". Sure that was part of the job, but service was even more important. That's where most sales came from. Believe it or not, a lot of agents were hired to "Grow with those we know". Raw new business was actually discouraged for a time. There was a time when we were allowed to write 4 HO policies per month. Period, end of story.
Things change, and at some point, it's not for everybody.
So, as likely the only insurance agent in an auto/home household you feel no obligation to help a family identify life insurance needs/solutions? Obviously, you made no effort to help them plan for retirement or children’s education either. Instead, you just want to provide an auto/fire product that is required by law ? I hope you never describe yourself as a salesperson or in sales. That would be untrue and a gross exaggeration. SF has a lot of extraordinary agents-present company excluded.
I know this particular post is about associates funds and not the retail funds available to customers. But this is representative of why agents hesitate to push things other than auto, home, and to some degree, life. State Farm keeps jumping into, and then bailing out of things they don’t find lucrative for whatever reason. But they expect agents to be “all in” on products that most customers don’t show interest in. And “all in” means an agent is expected to invest time and money that State Farm wouldn’t. For little to no return. But State Farm graciously pimps the agents to outside partners at below market price. No thanks.
YUP! This is across all lines. They have appeared to have lost their reputation.