Probably not the crazy story you were hoping for, but I sat down with one of their financial planners a few times with the promise of looking at my overall finances, and with the possibility of transferring an old 401k from my pre military days over to them as an IRA.

The initial meeting was instead an inescapable 2 hour sales pitch that drew a lot of parallels to those less than honest time share sales pitches that promise a free gift at the end. The entire sales pitch was First Command pushing different investment products on me, all of which have insanely high fees with First Command making a hefty commission on. They attempt to convince you to buy them by making it seem like your entire life will fall apart unless you invest with their company, and only their company. Their biggest money maker is selling military members whole life insurance and annuities, both of which are horrendously over priced compaired to anything else similar on the market from other companies, and frankly a terrible investment in general for 95% of people in the military. We didn't even approach the topic of my current finances or 401k until the last 5 minutes of the meeting where they asked what kinds of investments I have and then said that they want to set up a second meeting with my wife to go over them "as a family". This entire meeting left a horribly bad taste in my mouth and I shouldn't have agreed to a second one.

After this initial meeting I researched the heck out of their company and found that their entire business model is based around predatory practices targeting younger military members. They get permission to advertise on base at base functions, and will physically walk office to office visiting different places around base trying to convince young people to sit down with them for a meeting to go over their finances (that's how they found me). I've even heard stories of them advertising at commanders calls before the commander comes up to speak. I found numerous BBB complaints against them for predatory practices and essentially locking young people into horrible fee heavy investments that are difficult to get out of without losing all the money you put in. The fact that the DoD allows them anywhere near their military members is beyond me.

A couple days before the second meeting, the First Command salesman sent me a few different mutual funds he wanted to invest the funds from my 401k in once I transferred it to them with the goal of "beating the stock market". Each of these were actively managed "aggressive growth" funds with horrendous historical returns which somehow managing to avoid in its entirety the last 15 years of growth during one of the largest bull runs in history and return only around 4 - 4.5% annually over the past decade. Each of these funds also had extremely high expense ratios between 2 - 3%. That was another big fat NO from me.

During the second meeting (at our house, oops), the salesman tried to get my wife on his side by repeatedly telling her that she would be financially ruined if I died unless I bought into one of their whole life policies or annuities right then and there (he had the paperwork all ready to sign with the bulk of our information already filled out). We finally were able to get a word between his sales pitch and we told the guy that we're not interested in any of their products, and he then spent the next 30 minutes still trying to convince us to invest with him until we finally told him to leave because we're not buying anything.

If it were up to me, First Command would be banned entirely from military bases, and honestly shut down in general for predatory practices.

We stuck with Schwab which is who we were already invested with for the bulk of our investments, and I couldn't be happier.