Struggling with your electric bill? Get an energy assist from SDG&E and save. You may qualify for an 18% discount. Visit sdge.com/fera to find out more. On the previous episode of Radical Personal Finance, I shared with you a story that I learned from a friend of mine who had recently traveled down to Mexico.

And at the end of that episode, I shared the story about how the Mexican drug cartel had cultivated some inside contacts in the local bank. And in the local bank, they were able to find out the various account balances of the patrons of that bank. The cartel then used that information to know how much they should extort from their kidnapping victims when they would go and kidnap the family members of those particular people who worked there in the bank.

If you were Joe Smith and they knew that Joe Smith has – Joe Smith is a bad name. If you were Juan Rodriguez and they found out that Juan Rodriguez has 30,000 pesos – I don't even know the exchange rate – $30,000 in their bank account, then they could come to you and they could kidnap you or kidnap your wife or kidnap your daughter and come and know that you could at least have the money to be able to withdraw $30,000 from your bank account to pay the ransom and get your family member back.

Well, this leads me to the topic of today's show, and that is how important it is for you to keep control of your information security when dealing with your financial advisor. Frankly, in the years that I worked as a professional financial advisor, meeting with hundreds and hundreds of people, I was sometimes a little bit shocked at how much information people would give me.

Not that I didn't appreciate it, and I have to say I want to be careful because it was a compliment to me when people would give me their information because for many it meant that they trust me. And I don't treat that trust lightly. At the end of the day, we've got to trust people oftentimes with information.

You can't spend your whole life keeping everything to yourself. There is a place for trust, and there are people who I believe are trustworthy, and I believe that I am one of those people who is trustworthy. I'm extremely careful with people's information. I'm extremely – and have been even for years to never talk about how much money somebody has, never talk about how much money somebody makes.

I'm very uncomfortable when anybody wants to talk to me about any financial question in a public space. I always refer that back to private. So it was always a compliment that people would give me information because they perceived me to be trustworthy. However, in my years as a financial advisor, I saw many people take actions that I don't think were a good idea.

And here's the crux of today's show. You should not trust your financial advisor to keep all of your information private, secret, and secure. It is your job to keep your information private, secret, and secure. Now, I'm sorry. I do think that you should have that expectation. Sorry, I think you have the right to that expectation.

It's a reasonable expectation for you to expect your financial advisor to keep your information private, secret, and secure. But unfortunately, it's naive for you to have that expectation. Let's talk about private. When you disclose your personal financial information, you are surrendering some of your privacy. That can range to minimal.

I have about this much money. It's stored in these ways. What do you think? To extreme, such as, "Here are all of my account statements. Here are all of my banking and credit card records. Here is all the information on the inner workings of my family." When you give up that information, not only are you giving up that information to your financial advisor, you're also giving that information to your financial advisor's staff.

Most financial advisors will work with a team of people. Fellow advisors, administrative staff, possibly other consultants who they may engage in their office. And you're automatically basically giving up control of that data and control of that information to multiple unknown people. I encourage you, if you're going to share with your financial advisor or prospective financial advisor, I encourage you to ask them questions about who will have access to that information.

Financial advisory offices of, I'm going to say here, all firms. It's not that the firms don't want to, but basically the financial advisory offices of basically all firms are very sloppy, in my experience, are very sloppy with informational security. The names associated and the associated information. You have a right to privacy, but you will have to protect that privacy yourself.

There are certain aspects and parts of information that your financial advisor needs. They need to know basically how much money you have if you're going to hire them to create for you a comprehensive financial plan. They need to know basically what it's invested in if you're going to hire them to create an analysis of your account and to give you advice.

They need to know certain things, but they don't need to know everything, and they don't need to know everything all up front. Hopefully, you've done a good job of vetting them before hiring them, but still, you should be careful. And there are some things that your advisor needs to know and some things that they don't need to know.

Here would be an example. If your grandmother died and left you half a million dollars in a trust, you don't need to tell your financial advisor that information right up front. Yes, it may be pertinent and it may need to come into the conversation at a later date, such as when you're discussing the asset allocation of your portfolio and you're trying to figure out how conservative and how aggressive to hold it, but you don't need to tell them at the first meeting.

Perhaps your grandfather left you a valuable gold coin collection. The gold coins have one of the wonderful attributes of being very, very private. Unless the person can swing open the door of the safe and see the money there, nobody knows how much money you have when you hold it in the form of gold coins stacked in a safe.

There's no reason for you to go and tell your financial advisor about all those gold coins. That will only come into play in the context of a specific financial recommendations, such as, "Joe, I think you need about two million dollars of life insurance." "Well, Joe, if you've got $200,000 in gold coins, you can very well say, 'Okay, I'll need 1.8.'" Of course, in that situation, just buy the two million.

It's going to cost you an extra $1.37 a month. No big deal. Or let's say you're doing an asset allocation, and the advisor recommends to you that you put 5% of the portfolio into precious metals in the context of that portfolio. Well, just tell them, "I don't want to do that.

I'd rather own my precious metals in another form," and have them recommend to you a different portfolio that doesn't include precious metals. You can do your own precious metals portfolio allocation with the gold coins that granddad left you. There's no reason for you to expose all of these things.

Now, why is this important? It's important because although you have the right to expect your financial advisor to keep your information private and there are certain laws and firm expectations, meaning the actual employing financial advisory firm, company expectations and rules mandating that they will keep that information private. You do not have an expectation of secrecy with your financial advisor.

You do not have attorney-client privilege. Attorney-client privilege is one of the most important fundamental legal concepts that you need to think about at certain stages of your financial life. When you engage an attorney, you have, under certain circumstances, the legal right to secrecy. And your attorney cannot be forced through the threat of the courts and legal injunctions, etc., to disclose certain aspects of your information and certain points of your communication together if that has been done in a private format.

And there are certain exceptions. You should study that subject out. But your financial advisor or your banker or your accountant enjoy no such legal privilege. That means that if somebody sues you and if your financial records are subpoenaed by the court, your financial advisor has a legal duty to disclose those.

They cannot hold your files back. They are not your attorney. They can't hold your files back. And if you have given your financial advisor every single detail on your entire financial situation, you're now going to disclose all of your information under the threat of a legal order. Everything will be brought to the light.

Also, your financial advisor is governed by the Patriot Act. And the Patriot Act requires your financial advisor to keep an eye out for activities such as money laundering or suspicion of money laundering. And every single financial firm, by law, is required to deliver training to their advisors and to their staff on how to spot things like money laundering, how to spot things like suspicious transactions.

This is one of the reasons why you want to avoid bringing $100,000 in a briefcase and plunking it down on your financial advisor's desk. Because they will go right to their firm's compliance officer, and that firm's compliance officer will immediately file paperwork with the government, and you'll immediately have some knocks on your front door.

Or at least you probably see a white panel van across the street with some antennas sticking out the roof. The point of this is not to say that you're breaking any law. You're not a crook. I'm not a crook. The point of it is to say that you don't know what laws might be changed that will make you a crook in the future.

And you don't know who might be after you to get access to that information in the future or for what reason. And so prudence would say some things are on a need-to-know basis. You don't have to disclose everything to your financial advisor. You don't have to disclose everything to your accountant.

You don't have to disclose everything to your banker. You need to transmit to your financial professionals the information that they need to do their job properly. That means that if you've hired an attorney to work on your estate plan, that attorney should probably should know about the $200,000 in gold coins.

Because that's going to be a factor, and who's going to be given those gold coins when the safe is opened after your death. But the person who's selling you an insurance policy doesn't need to know all of those details. I've led with the tinfoil hat stuff. Let's just talk about the biggest threat, point three, security.

The security of your information in most financial advice offices is awful. Absolutely awful. Here's what usually happens. Number one, you spend all of your time communicating with your financial advisor using an unencrypted email system. It's from your Gmail to their wire house email provider, whatever. You have no clue about the security of their system.

Now, Gmail is very secure. They do a good job on that. Unless you're dumb enough to have an easy to choose password, unless you're targeted by somebody who's sophisticated who can brute force your password, unless you actually have your mother's maiden name as the answer to the security question and they can log in and reset your password, unless you don't have two-factor authentication enabled on your account, which nobody does, and unless you've already publicized that email across every social media profile that you have and it's clearly visible and findable by every single person that you engage with.

Which means that if somebody gains access to your email account, a la Sarah Palin in the 2008 presidential elections with somebody just guessing her security questions on her Yahoo account, somebody gets in, all your information is there. So you're conveying important information to your financial advisor via an unencrypted, unsecure system known as email.

Think email can't be hacked? Pretty easily? Well, let me ask you, how many crazy emails have you gotten in the last couple of years? Because I think it's happened probably to all of us, and if it hasn't happened to you, it will. And that assumes you're not a big target.

But of course, if you're working with a financial advisor, you would be a big target because you have a lot of money. What else? Well, you're going to send stuff to your financial advisor and communicate with them via unencrypted email, and they're going to print everything off because most financial advisors are terrible at the physical security of their data and they don't care.

Financial advisors are generally old. They're not technically competent. They don't use a scanner. They don't use a shredder, and they don't feel it's important. They'd rather have boxes and boxes of paper files with all the information in them. So let's talk about the information that is usually contained in a financial advisor's client file.

Well, number one, there's probably various account application paperwork stored there. Also, whether it's for an insurance policy or for an investment policy, what's on that? Well, your name, your full legal name, your date of birth, your social security number. What else is there? A check that's available for the funding of the account.

That check features a routing number and an account number. You've probably also given a series of statements to the financial advisor, account statements of all of those, your information on all of your accounts. Those have all been copied and are held there in the file, and everything is just sitting right there in a little manila folder in a file cabinet that almost never gets locked in an office building that's pretty easy to access.

Unfortunately, in just about any industry that you're involved in or any class or group of people, you're going to have a few percent of the people who are absolute criminals, and they range on a scale of despicability from mild to extreme. But it's not infrequent that somebody who's working at a financial firm might take the time to purloin a little bit of the data and use it for later.

And if you've given somebody your home address, your checking account information, your date of birth, you've filled out a life insurance application that says, "Oh, I want my mother to be the beneficiary here," and you put down that name, "and my father to be the beneficiary here, and your children's names," etc.

Are you starting to get a little bit nervous with that information, especially when I tell you it's just sitting in a manila folder stacked on your financial advisor's desk? Especially when your financial advisor is used to chatting with their fellow financial advisors about the names of their big client, and somebody who's in the office can certainly listen and grab that info?

Security of your data is generally very, very poor. I think it's getting better, thankfully. But that transition process is very, very slow. When I was in the business, I was one of the leaders. I was one of the first people to digitize all my files and shred everything, and part of it was security.

Part of it was convenience, but also security. But the transition process is very, very slow. I don't believe that you can trust your financial advisor to keep your information private, secret, and secure. You do have an expectation of privacy, and if your financial advisor betrays your right to privacy, that should be grounds for you to fire them.

That is unacceptable. You should expect your financial advisor to be very, very careful, very circumspect. You have no legal authority to enforce secrecy. So don't tell anything to your financial advisor that you don't want told publicly, that you wouldn't want it tested publicly in court when your advisor has been compelled to testify in a case – in a fight between you and your partner or in a divorce proceeding or in some contentious situation that you can't even imagine right now because they have no legal right to not.

And then when they're commanded to turn over their file, they're going to turn over everything in the file. And you have no expectation, really, of security, so you'll have to take that on yourself. So what can you do? Well, number one, raise a stink about it. Start with some questions to your financial advisor to ask them.

If I give you this information, how are you going to protect it? Who in your office are you going to share it with? How is this information going to be shared among people that I don't know? Questions are always acceptable. And just by asking the questions, you'll start to raise the issue for your financial advisor to consider.

And very few, in my experience, are actually considering the question. Next, you should keep information on a need-to-know basis. There are certain people who need to know certain aspects of information. When you are enlisting the aid of an accountant to advise you on your taxes, they need to know all of the information that's pertaining to your taxes.

But they don't need to know the numbers and amounts of your life insurance policy. They don't need to know how much money is in your 401(k) account. So there's no reason to tell your accountant. If you're retaining the services of a financial advisor to work on your asset allocation plan, they don't need to know the profit margin in your business.

They don't need to know the full list of all the deductions that you took in your business last year. If you're buying a life insurance policy, you don't need to talk to them about -- you get the point. I don't need to keep giving examples. Just ask yourself, does this person need to know it?

Now there's a balance here. A good financial advisor does need to know some of the information. But they often don't need all of the specifics. Or at least you can get some advice in general before you give all of the specifics. So keep information on a need-to-know basis. You should be very careful in how you communicate with people the information in the first place.

You should never discuss financial information through email. Any time you sit down to write an email or any email that you receive, you should ask yourself this question. This is a postcard and it's going to be published on the internet. Am I okay with that? If you're not okay with what you're sending or receiving in the context of an email being published publicly on the internet, don't send it.

That includes personal, hurtful, careful, secret information. It also includes things like personal financial data. Do not send such things via unencrypted email. At the very least, use your financial advisor's encrypted email system or secure document uploading system. Your advisor's firm has something like this. The thing is that none of the advisor's clients use it.

When I was an advisor, we had the option to do encrypted email. It was very simple that we could send the email encrypted to the user. It was relatively pretty simple for the user to do it. But people don't want to do even the simplest thing of unencrypting an email no matter how easy the process is.

And so when you're a professional, you get used to serving the masses, which don't want to be bothered. So you discuss things via unencrypted email. Hey, it's not going to hurt me as the advisor. I'm going to feel sad about it. But at the end of the day, I'm tired of people saying, "How do I set up this encryption thing again?" So they have a system.

They're just not used to using it. So require your advisor to communicate with you via encrypted email. If you don't already use encrypted email, make sure that you do. The simplest thing is you'll use ProtonMail, protonmail.com. It's like Gmail but better, and it's encrypted end-to-end. So make sure that your advisor's firm, they have systems set up.

Make sure that they're communicating with you via encrypted email. Or if you need to send documents, use a secure encrypted upload system to upload the document to their file management system. There's been tremendous progress in the last few years with paperless systems, and you can use those systems. No unencrypted email.

No communication with things like that. Email is the worst, again, because of email hacking. When you send information to a financial advisor, whether you're uploading it, giving it in person, etc., redact some of the data. If a financial advisor is doing an analysis on your accounts, they do have a need to know what percentage of your portfolio is invested in stocks, which particular stock funds they are, what the share price was that you bought, what your basis is, etc.

All of that information is something that your financial advisor needs to know. That's not information that the person who's selling you a life insurance policy needs to know. They just need to know you have $200,000 in stocks or $20,000 in stocks. But even with the financial advisor, when you give them that information, there's no reason whatsoever for them to have your account number.

So the way that you redact information is you print out the statements. That's fine. Take out a big black sharpie and redact with the sharpie, copy out, cross out all of the information that's printed underneath it. And then here's the secret. You have to make sure that you run those papers through a copy machine.

So many times people would say, "Hey, here's a paper," and they cross something out with a sharpie. All you do is pick it up, hold it to a bright light, or tilt it at a right angle, and you can see the numbers right through it if it's a sharpie.

But if you take it, cross it with a sharpie, and then run those papers through a copy machine, then that information will be fully removed from the system. So pull out the account numbers. If you're with Wirehouse A and they're analyzing Wirehouse B, they probably should know that it's Wirehouse B, but they don't need to know where all of your bank accounts are.

They don't need to know what company manages your mom's trust fund, etc. So just have things diversified and don't trust too quickly. There's a real balance in my experience between the question of paranoia and – I don't know what the opposing thing is, but the point is you got to be a little bit paranoid.

It's really important to be a little bit paranoid. Recognize that every single company you do business – in today's world, here's I think a good place to start from. Every company you do business with today is going to have their files hacked and published to the internet where anybody who wants to can buy them.

The US government cannot maintain security of its top secret employees and clearances. There was a massive data breach recently on even the US government systems with – what was the name of that form that – it's a form that government contractors have to use, and all that information was disclosed.

Just recently – I read one of the recent Tom Clancy books. He's dead, but they're still publishing on in the Jack Ryan series called True Faith and Allegiance. It's an interesting novel. But the basic premise of it was that a hacker was able to hack all of the information from a US government database of people who had top secret clearances and then use that combined with publicly available information, everything that's on our Facebook profiles, etc.

They were able to use that information to target with criminal intent all these different members and employees of the US government. But it really pointed out a point because there was a breach just recently, and there have been several breaches of even the US government databases. The US government can't keep its hand on their data.

The Democratic and Republican national committees can't keep their hands on their data. Every single company that you do business with can't keep their hands on their data. Basically, at this point in time, you need to expect that every single piece of data that you give to a company that you're doing business with is going to be disclosed.

Now, I could do hours on the topic of how do you protect yourself, but basically, one of the simplest things that you do is you segment your data. And you hold everything in segmented pots. That means that you don't give everything to everybody. You pick and you choose, and you compartmentalize your data.

You should do the same thing with your financial data. If you proceed on the assumption that this information is going to be hacked and published to the web, I think it'll give you the appropriate level of paranoia to apply to your own decisions. This doesn't mean that you can't enlist good financial services.

This doesn't mean that you can't trust another person with the details of your situation so that they can give you an appropriate amount of advice. It does mean that you don't automatically give everything to everybody. That's the key. So when you're working with your financial advisors, don't trust all of them with all of your info.

Trust each of them with just enough information that they need to do their job. If you follow this advice, the day will come when you'll thank me. But you have to follow it now before you ever need it. The secret skill of wealth building is proactivity. The ability to foresee the future and then do what you need to do now to prepare for that future.

That's the secret skill. So you've got to constantly apply this to your own situation. People are being kidnapped in Mexico, and the use of that inside information, the inside information that's being taken from the local bank is being used against them to force them with the ransom amount, to figure out the ransom amount to make sure that they buy the life of their loved one back.

That may or may not be a risk to you, but it should be a good wake-up call for you to pay attention to your own data. You cannot buy life insurance when you just got diagnosed with cancer. You buy it now. Well, guess what? The company that has your data that got breached will send you the stupid identity theft monitoring thing when that gets breached.

But that won't do you any good. You've got to take the steps and protect yourself now. Don't trust all of your financial advisors with all of your information. Just trust the ones that need to know and trust them with what they need to know and nothing more. And trust me, you'll thank me.

This show is part of the Radical Life Media network of podcasts and resources. Find out more at RadicalLifeMedia.com. Struggling with your electric bill? Get an energy assist from SDG&E and save. You may qualify for an 18% discount. Visit SDGE.com/FERA to find out more.