<prompt> Human: A lot of people ask for financial advice and help in this subreddit, and Ive seen the question Why VanguardSchwabFidelity? or What about XXX investing firm? or What about this great financial adviser I just met whos going to manage my money?. To that end, Im going to share a personal experience from working with an investment company, why its a bad monetary decision, and why its a bad experience as a customer.I met a representative from First Investors at a health fair event near my employer free smoothies, yay! several years ago. At the time I was 25, not very financially savvy, and all I knew was that opening up a Roth IRA through them was something Id heard was a good idea, and seemed like a great opportunity.The :First Investors, like many financial companies NOT vanguardfidelityschwab, charges you a 5 up-front fee for all the investments you make through them. I set up a 300month Roth IRA contribution, which was really a 285month contribution after they took their cut. A Vanguard fund, on the other hand, has an expense ratio more like 0.1-0.3 20-50x less. After investing for several years and calculating my overall rate of return, my funds performed similarly to the market but I saw 5 less return on my investment because of those up-front fees. Bad times.The customer experience:I stopped investing with First Investors in early 2014 around the same time I started reading this subreddit and learning a lot more about finances. I started making monthly contributions through Vanguard instead. When doing my taxes a few weeks ago, I realized my mAGI was too high for Roth contributions oops and I needed to re-characterize my 2014 contributions as Traditional and then backdoor convert them to Roth. I called Vanguard first, had a rep call me back 10 minutes later so I didnt have to wait on hold, and within 3 minutes shed re-characterized my contributions and told me to call back tomorrow to do the conversion. Completely easy and painless, and it was obvious she does this kind of thing all the time. When I emailed my local account rep at First Investors 2 weeks ago, I never got a response. I emailed her again on Monday, no response. I called in today and had to spend what felt like forever on the phone describing the problem to them and telling them how I want to fix it. I was informed that I need to MAIL THEM not email a letter of instruction to re-characterize the distribution, then wait for the to change accounts, then MAIL THEM not email an IRA-Roth Conversion Form in order to do the conversion. In total, I was on the phone with First Investors for nearly an hour and now I have to handle two physical-mail transactions in order to make this happen.So please, all you new people who arent sure if you should go with the rpersonalfinance recommendations... or have a family member who doesnt understand why their investment company is a bad idea... TRUST ME as someone who has been there. Open your account with Vanguard, Schwab, or Fidelity. Youll pay less, youll make more money, and at the end of the day theyre a hell of a lot better about serving you as a customer.  <response>: I know the industry from the inside. I am not a FA at all. Im not even in financial services directly. My job is setting up and servicing the software they use internally. I know how they work. Let me say this: they have enough money as part of a single person firm to spend 30k give or take on our services. Weve got large clients and small clients, but most of them are financial services everything from asset management to insurance. Your description is fairly accurate, though some are worse than others in this regard. 