Camaplan vs equity trust

[Mark Vandzura]

Hey BP members,

I'm looking into self directed IRA's. Does anyone have experience with Camaplan or Equity Trust? Is one better than the other? What's the best bang for my buck? Love to hear your thoughts and experiences.

[Alan Johnson]

At the risk of straying off-topic, my experience would suggest that 'satisfaction' is largely related to establishing proper expectations beforehand.  This is especially important in a society that increasingly demands instant gratification ("Why can't I get a phone app to do everything related to the investment with just one click"?)

Setting proper expectations takes effort (sometimes a lot of effort).

Let me try to illustrate this with my own experience. I have a self-directed IRA, but I cannot use the company I work for as custodian. So I needed to select from one of our competitors. Knowing how this business works, I did the following to find the (second!) best custodian:

1. I called the general number for the IRA provider (see #2 below). If given a menu option, I selected "talk to someone about your existing account".  I wrote down long it took to connect to a live person.  When the person answered, I told them I was interested in opening an account but have some questions.  I noted whether they transferred me to another department (and, if so, how long it took) or if they offered to answer my questions themselves.
2. I asked if the company is a custodian or a third party administrator (TPA). If a TPA, I asked them who their custodian is. I then asked the date of their last audit by the custodian. If they didn't know, I asked them to find out and call me back. While waiting for the answer, I started Step 1 again with another IRA provider.
3. I asked if I would be assigned an account rep that I could speak to in the future if I had additional questions.  If the answer was 'yes' I asked for the name and contact information of the rep, and asked to be transferred to continue the conversation.  If the answer was 'no' I went back to Step 1 with another provider.
4. I described the investment I wanted to make with my IRA and asked if their company would administer it. If yes, I asked if they anticipated any nuances to the investment that I should be aware of. This allowed me to quickly get a sense not only of their knowledge of IRS regulations, but their ability to relate these regulations to a specific situation. Of course, if they would not administer the investment it was back to Step 1 with another provider.
5. I asked for a description of all of the documents and forms I would need to provide them in order for them to fund the investment, and how long it would take them to move the funds to the investment provider after receiving the documents.
6. I established expectations by asking what their specific roles and responsibilities would be, and what my specific roles and responsibilities would be.  (I already know the answer to this, but again I was trying to determine the knowledge level of the person on the other end of the phone.)
7. I asked how many clients they have, the dollar amount of assets under administration, and the number of employees in the firm.  I used this information to determine the client/employee ratio.
8. Regarding fees, prior to the call I had already downloaded their fee schedule from their website.  During the call I only asked clarifying questions about fee items that I didn't understand.
9. After narrowing down the field to 3 or 4 potential custodians, I called each account rep again to ask why I should consider them rather than the others.
10. At this point I selected the company based on the relationship I had established with the account rep.

Did this take a lot of time and effort?  Absolutely.  But in my case I considered the investment amount important enough to go through this process.

Of course, if I needed immediate gratification I could have skipped this effort by asking the BP community to recommend a provider, and simply selected the one that seemed to get the most favorable votes from people I don't really know....