Legacy Financial Advisors, Inc. - Westborough, Massachusetts

Peter Z.

My wife Maureen and I have been treated very poorly and unprofessionally by Matthew Pescatore of Legacy Financial Advisors. Maureen has a Prudential annuity established by Legacy and has not been able to access her account. When she tries to access her account through the portal, she gets messages that it has been “deactivated,” or she gets a “system error, we are having difficulty retrieving your information” message. When I sent an email expressing my frustration (without any insulting or inappropriate language) to Mathew Pescatore, he responded by email that we were being terminated as clients because we “have called my staff on many occasions yelling and cursing at them which is very disrespectful.” We in fact have called the office a few times since returning calls is not one of their strong points, but have usually spoken with a pleasant assistant, and expressed our frustration in a normal tone without ever having yelled or cursed at anyone. I have no doubt that any one of the Legacy employees would confirm this.
Matthew Pescatore attached a letter to his email message giving us 30 days to choose how we would like to terminate our association and threatening if we did not respond that he would liquidate the annuity after which he would send us a check which would trigger a taxable event. I am not sure this is even legal to do without our consent. It is unethical to make up lies and portray a client in a bad way with the intent of terminating a client relationship and even more unethical to threaten to liquidate an annuity (to which we still do not have access) with a result that is inimical to our financial interests. I am not aware of the structure of the rewards Paul Mauro and Matthew Pescatore receive when placing our investments into various vehicles but it seems terribly insulting and greedy to take our money, invest it into an annuity, refuse to help us access the annuity when Prudential’s computer systems and customer service structure become flawed, then to simply liquidate an annuity for their convenience and at our financial disadvantage, once these two financial “advisors” have made their profit.
We began our association with Legacy Financial Advisors in 2012, initially with a favorable impression. We transferred some of our retirement funds from the office 401K to an IRA including an annuity managed by Legacy. As the years went on it was more difficult to get in contact with Paul Mauro and we would try to meet with him once a year to discuss our investment goals. In 2020, I received a screwy retirement analysis which projected a balance 30 years into the future which was more than 20 times our investment balance at the time. I am not sure if Paul Mauro even reviewed this irresponsibly generated advisory document, probably generated by an assistant and mailed it to us. When I called the ridiculous analysis to his attention in addition to the poor investment performance of the portion of our investments managed by him, he seemed to backpedal awkwardly in barely coherent emails and came up with a revised analysis with more realistic assumptions. Fortunately, I had kept the majority of our retirement funds under my control and with the very little effort and attention allowed by my career, my self-managed account outperformed the Legacy managed account in every year. Furthermore, Legacy’s affiliations with third part agents Sagepoint, Osaic, Equip, LPL, etc. seemed to change every 2-3 years such that I had to transition to different online contacts with different account numbers to keep track of our investments. Finally in 2023 I decided to remove most of the funds managed by Legacy and invest them elsewhere with the remainder of our retirement funds. We were waiting for the date at which we could avoid a penalty to withdraw Maureen’s funds from the Prudential annuity. The annuity carried very high fees which dragged down the return.
As of the date of posting this, we have yet to recover access to this annuity.

Scott

We’d been associated with Legacy since 2011. Initially we were looking for a way to leverage our current financial situation, which was fairly stable and heading in the right direction, into a stable future for the family. Spent a few enjoyable hours with founder, Paul Mauro and company. We’re nearly the exact same age, so a lot in common. Main accomplishments were setting up a trust, an investment account and several annuities, designed to bridge the gap between 2011 and retirement about ten years hence.

The performance of the money invested with Legacy was very hard to assess. Partly because annuities have their own way of reporting data – none of which is particularly useful to the annuitant, and partly because the interface to the assets held by Legacy kept changing affiliations. I never understood why that was the case. Paul always had a plausible reason for the change… and a promise of a rosier, data-driven future. There were several such roll-outs, and with each, the promise to be better, faster, easier, more data-rich, yada-yada, than the last.

Fast forward to 2018 and the near the beginning of retirement. We’d done better in the last ten years of my career than predicted. Some of our investments (outside of Legacy) did better than expected. And we inherited some unexpected (and unwanted!) assets from parents. Financially speaking, things had changed. Legacy had yet another, “new” interface to roll-out. This turned out to be the LS (“last straw”) interface. Because I was one of the more tech-savvy “squeaky wheels”, Legacy used me as a beta site (read: victim) for the roll-out. In my opinion, this “LS” roll-out was a step backwards in terms of visibility and in the way I manage my investment accounts. As a result, we reluctantly decided to migrate assets from Legacy to a different financial entity. It was slow at first – mountains of paperwork - but eventually we moved all the separate and joint accounts for investments and retirement, out of the Legacy domain. That’s when things really began to unravel. We were asked to move my mother-in-law’s small nest egg of retirement assets from Legacy. Without our assets, hers were too small to qualify for their "practice". Getting answers to questions about that little nest egg took weeks and weeks. Eventually, we simply stopped asking. It is still an issue. And as for the residual of our half a dozen or so annuities, well, we were advised to get in touch with the company holding them rather than dealing through the originator, i.e., Legacy staff. Have you ever tried to learn to speak “annuity”? It is not one language but a mélange of dialects (Jackson National is different than Allianz, is different than Prudential, is different than MA Mutual / Ascend, etc. ). Without the assistance of a friendly advisor (who was no longer very friendly and now an unwilling advisor) to translate, it is almost impossible to decipher. Currently we’re in the process of unwinding these annuities on our own. It seems that the money Legacy made from selling these highly profitable financial products was all made at the front end, thus there's no incentive to service the accounts now at the back end. We’ve been left completely on our own. That applies to my family and the 87 year old mother-in-law!

A parting word of advice to Legacy: it is far less expensive to keep an existing customer than to find a new customer. And now for a bit of introspection: there are some customers you wish upon your competitors. Could I have joined that illustrious group? Perhaps.

So in spite of the cruises in Boston Harbor, the shred-fests, the Christmas holiday celebration, the 50th anniversary celebration, etc., all tangential to the true function of the company (and none of which we'd ever attended), we must drop this review on Legacy. Be cautious. We are a client who went from enthusiastic and grateful to one who is disappointed, jaded, but perhaps a bit wiser. Onward.

jr.seiton

Raj K.

Roger T.