Northwestern Mutual reviews

You are really just a Life Insurance Salesperson - If you want to be a well- rounded advisor to your clients then this is not your place. But if you want to be seen as the "Life Insurance Guy" to all of your closest friends, this may be your place. But even so, look around for better companies because they are out there. You pay for everything. It is almost impossible to become profitable in your business with all of the expenses they sadlle you with. Phone, Rent, Forced Assistant, Copier, Furniture, All Meals, All Travel Expenses to Company meetings, etc.. Trust me, it adds up! They want you to believe that paying for all those expenses is in the clients best interest because it keeps the companies overall expenses low, therby raising dividends. But there are at least 3 other companies that pay for most of things and have a higher Dividend? Makes you wonder... There is a reason they were voted as a best place to launch a career and not maintain a career. Once you realize what other companies are out there, you will leave. This is a captive company- which means if you ever decide to leave them and move to another firm, or start your own firm, you do not keep any of the commissions you earned. They keep them all. Most other companies allow you to keep your renewals when you leave because you have earned them! Its a scam. career agents do not transfer their practice to Northwestern Mutual Life for a reason. You will not find Anyone who came from another Insurance company to nml, all the agents over 5 years started out there and now cannot leave because they would lose all their renewals. You can never use your own business name, you will always be representing an insurance company and you will find most potential clients are not as open to talking to you about anything other than Insurance. The training is terrible. There is very little product knowledge taught and all of the Senior Advisors that come in to talk to you just want you do joint work with them, then take half your commissions and your clients when you leave the company because your clients are actually the companies clients , not yours! They tell you its your own business to run, but dont buy into that! They dictate everything and treat you like you are a child. If you choose to opt out of their daily, weekly, and monthly time-wasting meetings, you are ostrasized and they will try to force you out. You must drink their kool-aid. They are a Direct Recognition Life Insurance Company- Research this before joining. You may want to be with a Non-Direct recognition company for your clients benefit. Most people there dont even know what this actually is.. Dont be fooled by the initial compensation models they give you, that only takes into account if you have an upper-class family to intitally sell-to and they always show you the highest models.Also- be Careful of their Mutual Selection hiring process as everything they say is a "canned" speech and not unique to you, even though thats the way it may sound. Bottom Line: If you want to just be a Life Insurance Salesperson, this may be an option for you, but still there are many other better companies with better priced products, much smaller expenses and higher commision rates out there. If you want to be seen as a well-rounded advisor to your clients and not a Life Insurance Peddler, this is not definetly not your place.

I went into the FASTRACK training program as a career changer and had done some due diligence as to where to go to get into a career as a financial advisor. And although I got some good advice from people outside of the Northwestern Mutual bubble, nothing they told me really prepared me in the way that I wish I had been prepared. First, you must understand that NW has a duality. There is a NW "cult" like mentality which will impact each office around the country. That cult is that NM is THE BEST and that by hooking up with them you, the rep, are ELITE. But at the same time each NW office around the country has it's own personality. If you leave NM (and it is more likely than not that you will because of their business model) and if you choose to stay in the field of insurance or financial advising, be warned: If you don't stay beyond several years you will never see the residual payments that make insurance sales lucrative. I left after 18 months and went to a firm with only a loose affiliation with another insurance company. What I left behind was much of the second year and future payments that would make my "start up" phase easier. Be warned: NM's business model is very clear: they will milk you for all of your contacts and push you hard (harder than you might be able to stomach) to make sales. They will tell you the only way to land business at the start is to do "joint work" (which is pretty much true for most people) but that means giving up 50% of your commissions. The people that you do joint work with will look upon you as a cannon fodder. They pretty much know that you won't be around in a six months or a year or two and they will smile and be nice to you but most of them won't take the time to really teach you or help you learn simply because they don't want to spend time doing so. No, they will happily help you close business and reap the perpetual rewards of the business you tee up for them but very few will really do much to help you. If you ask for (which I did) a split fee other than 50% (say you ask for 60%) they will likely chuckle and flip you off. They know you have little power to negotiate because your back is against the wall because you have a quota you must meet. The biggest reason not to work for NM is that you will be asked to sign a contract. That contract you sign will pretty much lock you into selling NM product. No one will likely go out of their way to do what is best for the client and show them options from other carriers. This fundamentally irritated me as I want to do what is best for my clients. On the investments side, I did three deals with about a total of $400k of AUM. Because NM does not encourage you to work towards your FINRA licences until you've been there a while (they want you to focus on selling insurance), if you end up with a client with investments, you will not get any monetary benefit from your client (I know I personally did not get into this business to enrich the bank accounts of colleagues who don't care if you stick around.) Watch out for your joint work partners: they might be "good guys" and they're all super charming (except for me in one case a guy who really was repugnant and screwed me over by excluding me from communications and meetings with a client once he got the idea that I might not stay with the firm) but they mostly see you as meat. Have a sit down with each joint work partner before you bring business to them and make then agree, in writing, to a set of principles as to how you will work together. Otherwise you will find yourself with a client who thinks of you as bump on a log and you may very well find that your joint work partner has commandeered the relationship which you had to begin with.