I’ve been critical of the United First Financial Money Merge Account for a few months now. My critique is simple: The program is not worth $3,500. It’s worth less than $100. All the MMA does is direct you to use all available cash each month to pay down more of your mortgage. You can do that for free. The budgeting tools that are offered with the software are no better than other packages on the market like Quicken.
On of the criticisms I’ve faced from UFF “agents” is that I simply don’t understand the program. I haven’t tried it. I haven’t seen how it REALLY works. I just don’t know what I’m talking about.
They are wrong. I know exactly what they’re selling, and that’s the problem. If my analysis wasn’t right on the money, they wouldn’t be so bothered. “Have a free analysis done!” they tell me.
So I did. And while the report UFF generated looked nice, it didn’t tell me anything I didn’t already know about the Money Merge Account. And the agent who did the analysis was deceptive, and therefore the report I was given was untruthful.
The report says: “This report illustrates the results that could be achieved by establishing a Money Merge Account program. The accuracy of this report is consistent with the information you have provided.”
Except the report wasn’t consistent with the information I provided. It left out some very important information that would have influenced the results significantly.
I made up a mortgage with a monthly payment of $1,300. I made up an income, and reported that I had no debts besides my mortgage. I indicated that each month after paying all bills, I had $1,250 left over.
The agent asked a couple of questions, and I told him that my required monthly payment on the mortgage is $1,300, but that I usually pay extra.
Extra? Extra? Did he factor that into my analysis? NO!!!!
So the analysis was done, and what do you know… The Money Merge Account will help me pay off my mortgage in just over half the time of my current schedule. Except the agent completely ignored my additional payment each month, and that wasn’t made clear in the report. The result? The benefit of the MMA is overstated. Significantly.
The analysis I was provided also proves what I’ve said all along: The Money Merge program works almost solely based upon simple prepayment of the mortgage. The program requires you to get a home equity line of credit (HELOC) and do a money shuffle on a regular basis. But the proof is in the pudding… that shuffle does virtually nothing, and the benefits the consumer receives are wholly based upon just putting extra money toward the mortgage each month. (They can do that for free! No need to pay $3,500 to do that!)
Why be deceptive like this in presenting the numbers? Because the better they make the results look, the more impressed the consumer will be, the more likely they’ll shell out the $3,500 for the program.
And I’ll suggest that if the program was really “all that,” they wouldn’t need to lie about it. There would be no need to inflate the results of MMA, because the results would speak for themselves.
11 Sep 08 at 11:36 am
So … the agent basically confirmed what you were already doing for free. Nice.
The thing that makes me mad about this is that a lot of the agents have been suckered into the plan themselves with no prior financial experience so they don’t really know what they’re selling either. They put forth a convincing (scripted) pitch and are sincere in their belief in the program (because they bought it in the first place), and even if they do figure it out there’s a desire to not feel like a sucker and maintain that facade of “no it works, it really works - trust me.”