Not for everyone. But they will take anyone. - Financial Advisor Equitable Advisors Employee Review

2.0
2 Apr 2021
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

You have independent career. There is no set working hours or salary. Don't expect to get a paycheck every week. People are nice. Some are happy and others are successful. Most don't make it to 4 years.

Cons

Many challenges. 1. They take half your commissions from the onset. They will give a little of that back in what is a complex formula called POP. Your manager gets 30%. This is why he or she hires you even if you don't have experience. 2. They charge you almost everything you use like office or cubicle, telephone, computer package, subscriptions, cloud storage for your files, financial planning software, errors and omission insurance, licenses for everything and anything else. Can be up to nearly $1000 per month after 3 years when you have to sign a agreement. 3. All the experienced advisors will use you to their benefit. They call it teaming. 4. If you had a career making decent money over 50k in another industry and want to try this, go-ahead. But after 2-3 years, you will lose your previous career, connections and will always be in this retail financial services industry. 5. There are two business units. Traditional and RBG. Don't ever do the RBG business unit. It's the ones you go talk to school teachers in their school locations. With Covid and uncertainty, it's a real challenge. They usually get new college grads to this unit. 6. You will lose friends and family. They will take your first meeting or two and then never talk to you since they think you want to sell them high cost Insurance and Annuities. 7. High margin products like insurance and annuities are how you make money. Not low margin products like advisory or investment accounts. 8. Compliance and regulatory challenges. You do your own paperwork and if something is wrong, Compliance will make you do it over and get new signatures. 9. Making meetings is difficult. Be aware of this. If you cannot make meetings by calling people, then this is not for you. You cannot really use social networks to make meetings.

Explore other reviews about Equitable Advisors

5.0
2 Apr 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Compensation structure, product availability, brokerage system, overall tools, open structure to do best for your clients

Cons

Support staff are more hands off, not a lot of in house support staff members.

1.0
26 June 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Complete freedom to build your book of business anmd schedule.

Cons

Horrendous place to start. Managers run their own practice and have little to no time to actually help you outside of your joint meetings so you're on your own. They only give you 2 options to get clients, cold calling or their retirement benefits group through schools. Basically the whole advising piece is to just to sell life insurance and annuities. The support staff is thin so you're kind of on your own with paperwork and compliance docs. They just genuinely offer you nothing. No help with covering costs (you pay for all your licensing and marketing materials), they even charge you for using the company laptop and fees for programs you will never use. They will mislead you about the commission payouts and you only really get something if you get them to buy an annuity or life insurance. If you also have a remaining balance of any fees when you leave, they will literally sending you threatening letters demanding the money and threaten you with claims court if you don't pay it back.

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