Beware of CD Alternatives Being Pushed By Banks

One of my readers told me in an email that an investment guy at his bank was trying to sell him on bonds while he was redeeming a matured CD. In the last month I also have seen this. While I was at PNC and Chase, the bankers referred me to one of their investment advisors. It should be noted that you may also see this at credit unions. Some examples at large credit unions include Golden 1 Investment Services and BECU Investment Services. So I thought it was worth repeating the following advice from Clark Howard:

You should never buy insurance or investments in a bank, though they'd love if you do just that. When you buy investments at a bank, you pay monster commissions and they tend to push you into their own products. It's a disaster for you.

If you are looking for alternatives to CDs, it's a good idea to do your own research. Here are two good sources of basic investment information:

• Clark Howard's Investment Guide
• Bogleheads® investing start-up kit

These provide an overview of sound investment strategies with a review of the basic asset classes like stocks and bonds. I plan to continue to focus on deposit accounts in this blog, but I'll try to touch on other products like immediate fixed annuities and Treasury Inflation Protected Securities.

I often post in the DepositAccounts.com Investments sub forum. Most of these posts include links to articles and resources on the web covering various topics of investments. If you come across useful articles and information on the web, feel free to post in this forum. You can follow the forum using this forum page which will show you the blog-like view of all of the featured forum posts.