Heritage Education Funds Inc (Heritage RESP) called unsolicited a couple of weeks ago. Immediately after the caller introduced himself, I said we’re not interested. He responded, “You’re not going to save for your child’s education?”
How crazy is that? Although it deserved no response, I said, “Yes, I am, but there are plenty of other options.”
I had already intended to go through my bank, TD Bank, but if he hadn’t been so rude, I would have researched their offering independently (online).
May 27th Update: seems we got our mobile phone added to some baby telemarketing list. Today, received a polite call from Canadian Scholarship Trust Fund RESP. Twin Utero has an interesting post with her negative experience, “But the fine print is extensive and extraordinarily cryptic. Even our financial advisor had trouble deciphering the details.” Babies are big business!
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7 Comments
This is indeed very rude. Some companies are just so desperate that they try to scare people into buying stuff. Sad…
Can’t count on those mutual funds … I lost faith in 401K after bad experience…
This is really sad companies for there profits are harassing people. They makes unwanted calls without caring about the people at other end.
Its moments like that I wish I could come up with something smart to say. I can always think of 50 things to say afterwards…. just nothing to say while. It doesn’t surprise me really.
Right after our son was born, we got calls, mail, you name it. When I enquired at the hospital, they said that they give some information to some agency which in turn probably rents their lists. The offers have now dropped off, but one thing we never got were calls for RESP. We eventually did go with CST due to recommendations from friends that use them. So far, we’ve been pretty happy — but then, my son is only 6-years old he won’t be drawing any money for sometime.
Yes - the calls were very annoying. Here we are trying to do the best with this wonderful gift we’d been given, and not getting much sleep since everything is so new and you’ve got telemarketers calling all hours of the day. Sure YOU might be awake but we were sleeping whenever we could and when we were not sleeping, the wife was busy feeding.
Phone or baby. Baby wins. Eventually I ended up having to be rude to the callers because they just would not stop.
I worked direct sales for a bit. Sales marketers don’t care if you are rude with them. They expect it.
Your experience is not representative of the company, but of the salesperson that called you. Just like any profession, 90% of sales employees are horrible at what they do. A professional would never resort to using the emotions of guilt or fear to sell a product.
You can use this negative experience as positive contrast. Sure, the phone call was annoying, but at least now the subject of your child’s future education is crisp in your mind, and you are able to comfortably research a financial strategy for this purpose.
When I was a young graduate student living in the US for a couple of years I got calls from people asking for me by name and very eager to sell me cemetary plots. I said I didn’t think I’d ever need one and terminated the call politely.
These people are stubborn, or nowadays their computers are. I’ve had calls in London from computers in the US playing messages to me, about free holidays. All I have to do is press 2.