Brokerage Firm Junket in the Great Outdoors

Okay, I may regret fanning the flames on this one, but I just can let it go without seeing what the reaction is.

My wife and I recently were on vacation, staying at a lodge near Yosemite National Park. As it happens this lodge is also a conference center, and on the second to last day we were there, representatives of a smaller, but still national, brokerage starting arriving for a meeting.

This is irrelevant to me, as I am strictly a no-load and bare-bones brokerage type of investor. However, a couple of questions occured to me as I was watching the attendees (and their familes -- must be nice) come in.

First, for those of you who do business with full-service brokers/advisors/planners/etc., do you feel you get your money's worth in terms of service, advice, and quality of investments that you are okay with some of the money you pay in sales charges, annual fees, etc. paying for your rep to attend a little excursion such as this (it's about a $300/night lodge).

Secondly, for those of you working in the industry, do you feel okay seeing clients' money -- which from their perspective they are investing for retirement, college savings, or other long-term needs -- used for trips like this -- particulary in a market such as this year's.

I'll take cover now.

Yep. I'm OK with it.

Regular people paid for your vacation as well. How do you feel about that? Were you Ok with the fact that other regular people may have had to cancel their family vacations this year because of the economy? Maybe we should have all cancelled our vacations.

I'm a little angry that I am paying for some Saudi's or Iranian's vacation though.

Oh well, I suppose I could never buy gas again.

This is irrelevant to me, as I am strictly a no-load and bare-bones brokerage type of investor.
Also, I can assure you that your boys over there at the no-load or discount brokerage are taking their own junkets, and they don't even have to talk to you.

Well I suppose regular people ultimately pay for all of us to have vacations. However, instead of my employer picking up the tab as a perk, mine comes to me in the form of a regular paycheck, from which I pay the usual array of federal and state taxes. Then I allocate most of it to my household's expenses, saving a small portion of it over time to be able to take a trip or two in a typical year. I don't know if the folks I observed were paying their own way out of their own paychecks, but I would feel pretty confident in betting that they were not (possibly they were doing so for their families).

Perhaps the organizations I do business with make enough profit on their reasonable expense ratios and commissions to pay for similar trips themselves. If so, I feel that they are able to afford it from a "normal" profit (to borrow a term from my old economics text book) and more power to them. Furthermore, that only pretty much reinforces my views of sales loads, 12b-1 fees, exit fees,etc. No, they don't have to talk me; I don't have to talk to them either.