My mom is coming up on 70, and isn't very financially literate. When my father died, he had a decent amount of life insurance and a retirement fund that she's now living off of combined with his old pension and social security. After she almost got swindled by one of her cousins into joining his active investment firm (at an expense ratio of 2.6% “as a favor”, yikes), I convinced her to instead put her money in Vanguard. She wanted some sort of advisor, so I hooked her up with their personal advisor service which was ~.3% expense ratio.
They set her up with a suite of passively managed broad based index and bond funds, and that felt reasonable to me so I haven't asked her about it since.
This week I found out that this vanguard advisor contacted her and told her about their “PAS active equity” funds, and she decided to join up on those. She hasn't told me which funds specifically – she doesn't even know which ones she agreed to – but they have already moved ~40% of her assets over to it.
I find this sketchy personally – isn't vanguard supposed to be the banner-carrier of passive investments? When I hooked her up with this service, I wasn't expecting her to be pitched actively managed funds by anyone.
Does anyone know about these Vanguard active funds, and if this is something I should be worried about/advise her against doing? Did anything change at Vanguard recently where advisors are being incentivized to sell these active funds?
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