nyt Going Off to War, and Vulnerable to the Pitches of Salesmen

[mom cat]

Going Off to War, and Vulnerable to the Pitches of Salesmen
By DIANA B. HENRIQUES

Published: July 20, 2004



Tyler Hicks/The New York Times
For Specialist Brandon Conger and other troops, a compulsory financial briefing at Fort Benning was a sales pitch for life insurance.

Captive Clientele
First article in a series:
Financial Advice, at a Price
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Related Sites
Defense Department Study on Insurance Sales Rules (pdf)

Brig. General Thomas R. Cuthbert's Study (pdf)

Pentagon Directive 1344.7 (pdf)




Annie Marie Musselman for The New York Times
Jennifer Jusseaume, with her husband, Brian, bought mutual funds at the Air Force Academy. Both are captains in the Air Force.





Linda Spillers for The New York Times
Specialists Nicholas Stachler, left, and Michael Fresenburg said they thought they had signed up for a savings plan.




icholas Stachler was 19 years old when he reported for basic training with the Army at Fort Benning, Ga., before shipping out for 11 months to Iraq.

A gentle, trusting man, he had only weeks earlier graduated from high school with a handful of trophies in hockey and soccer, middling grades and hardly a clue about how to handle his money. He had held only casual jobs baby-sitting and mowing lawns and had never opened a checking account. The bus trip to boot camp, from the foothills of the Appalachians in southern Ohio to the kudzu-covered fields of western Georgia, took him farther from home than he had ever been.

About six weeks into his training - six weeks of combat drills and drummed-in lessons in Army ways - he tasted one of the less-honorable traditions of military life: a compulsory classroom briefing on personal finance that was a life insurance sales pitch in disguise.

As he remembers the class and as base investigative records show, two insurance agents quick-stepped him and his classmates through a stack of paperwork, pointing out where they should sign their names, where they should scribble their initials. They were given no time to read the documents and no copies to keep.

Specialist Stachler says he thought he had arranged to have $100 a month deducted from his pay for some sort of Army-endorsed savings plan or mutual fund. When he returned from Iraq, he found that he had not been saving the money at all. He had been paying $100 a month in premiums for an insurance policy that promised him some cash value far down the road and a death benefit that was almost certainly less than $44,000, a small amount compared with the $250,000 in life insurance he had through a military-sponsored plan that cost him $16.25 a month.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/20/business/20military.html?hp

[The_Casual_Observer]

1. If called on this, the military would simply admit that the whole

thing was an error. But only if they were called on it.

[loathesomeshrub]

2. Shameful!