What you're describing is the classic mistake. You'll only be recommended products which pay a living-wage sales commission. Those include ripoff products like variable annuities and whole life, which are structured specifically to be impossible to understand, so you will never be able to figure out what a bad investment it is and how they're sneaking fees out of it.
However, they also include managed mutual funds with sales loads, that would be bad investments even if they didn't have sales loads.
Here's an example. My mainstay investment is VFINX. This is an index fund that tries to track the S&P 500. That is, it buys and sells its assets so they are proportional to the contents of the S&P 500. Since that's all it's doing, the fund costs very little to run. My costs are $0 front-end load, $0 back-end load, and 0.14% annual expense ratio. In other words $1.40 per $1000 invested, per year. Minimizing expenses is the surest investment in investing.
It's a fantastic investment by objective standards. But riddle me this: from what source does VFINX pay a "living wage" sales commission to my salesman? It can't. There's no money there.
Do you think your salesman is going to recommend VFINX?
Of course not. This is the crux of the problem with commission based salesmen.
What they'll sell you is a managed fund, where some Rain Man stock picker tries to beat the S&P 500. Rain Man requires a huge salary and a large research department, which requires an expense ratio ten times higher - typically 1.5% per year or $15 per $1000.
How do we even tell if a manager is any good? After all, the market goes up and down all by itself. How do we tell if he manager is doing better than can be expected? We compare their performance to an index such as the S&P 500.
So in order to beat the index fund, they must beat the market by 1.36% per year. [1.5% minus 0.14%). Are they able to? Statistically NO. Not even close. Nobody's that good. Some are lucky, but not repeatably. As such, science has shown that managed mutual funds aren't as good an investment, because of the high fees.
But even this high expense ratio doesn't pay the salesman, that's another charge called a sales load. They will either have a 5%-ish "front end load" coming in, almost all of which is kicked back to the salesman, or some sort of exit load that somehow subsidizes the commission. This is even more total loss for you.
Same nonsense with the annuities and whole life
Without fail, these salesmen recommend those to everyone. Life insurance and annuities probably don't even fit your needs; they're just easy to rack up commissions on. Whole life is a complicated way to bundle life insurance with investments again to conceal hidden costs. If you need life insurance by plain old term life, which is what it says on the tin. If you want investment too, invest too in smart investments.
Annuities are rarely appropriate and when they are, a fixed annuity will generally cover needs. And fixed annuities are simple and clear enough that any internal ripoffs will be obvious.
Again, variable annuities are a complicated way to combine both a fixed annuity + stock investing, and give you a giant snow-job so you don't understand all the hidden costs, expenses, fees and loads.
That's why those products are always pitched to you.
There is just no way for your interests to be fairly represented by someone who earns commissions on your investments.
