Is Your Agent Your Fiduciary?

Some recent events in my personal life have me thinking a lot about our ethical responsibilities to others, especially in a professional setting. I experienced a fellow agent failing to uphold his fiduciary responsibility to me as a client, and it made me take a step back. I've been taking for granted that other professionals uphold the same ethical standards as I do. 

Generally speaking, a fiduciary is a professional who is bound by either a code of ethics or a law to act in your best financial interest. 

As a health and life broker, I work on behalf of both my client and an insurance company and I have a legal fiduciary responsibility to both. Here are Wisconsin Health Insurance Advocate, LLC, we take our fiduciary role very seriously and a step further than our legal mandate. In fact, it's the first thing I talk about when interviewing potential new team members and something I go over in detail on our first day of training new staff.  To us, it's more than a legal or ethical obligation, it's the right thing to do and the best thing to do for our business. 

But not everyone can see the forest for the trees. I am prompted now to ask more questions, and to walk away when a situation doesn't feel right. I am still working on how to reconcile knowing that a violation, however minor, of my trust occurred. 

My current take away is this: ask any professional with whom you are dealing in money or insurance matters (health, life, retirement products, and so on) if they are going to act as a fiduciary for you. And, think about walking away if the answer is no. 

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