Charles Schwab Review

The one sentence title comes from our family experience with Schwab.

I have had only positive experiences with Schwab.

They are professional and courteous and always treat people right even if they don't have a lot of money. I think Schwab has a huge potential among lower income people who would not usually think of investing. My own encounters with them are proof of this.

There is a family story about Schwab that shows just how good our experience has been:

We are a blue collar family and my mother wanted to open an IRA. She expected to be treated poorly and was nervous about the whole process. Instead she was treated with respect and all questions were answered in recent months when the markets went down. She had only good things to say.

After she signed up for the account she told me that Schwab is not like the other "fancy" brokers and that she is sure the CEO must wear white socks. That is her approval for men who are "one of us" - that is, not upper class snobs and work hard for a living.

For our family this was important as both of my parents have some money to invest and are nervous about how to invest and how to ask questions without sounding foolish. Neither one of them is computer savvy. But the Schwab reps took the time to explain patiently and thoughtfuly how to trade and how to use the website.

Schwab is a company for people everywhere on the income scale. My mother called them the Regular Joe company and repeated the White Socks comment several times.

I showed her the photo of Schwab CEO Walter Bettinger, and told her it was highly unlikely, and that there was no way an expensively dressed and well educated gentleman like that would wear a pair of white sweat socks with his expensive business suits and his Italian shoes!!  My dad and my brother joined in on my side but she is set in her opinions.

She insisted he MUST be from a good working man's family and is really a typical working man himself.

Finally she gave in a little bit and said that if he was really a "suit", she would convince him to become a good blue collar man and put on a pair of overalls instead of his "fancy suit".

She would make him over into "one of us"!

I know that doesn't sound like a positive comment, but that's about as high a compliment as my mother could possibly give. As my dad says, my mother could sell ice to eskimos. 

Blue-collarizing the identity of the classy CEO of a brokerage firm would be all in a day's work for her!

He might resist surrendering his pinstriped suit and his upper class trappings, but Mom doesn't take no for an answer.

And if anyone could talk, wheedle, coax, and drag that dapper and distinguished and upper class CEO out of his polished designer wingtips and push him into a pair of dusty Carhartt work boots, and argue him out of his black Brooks Brothers socks and into white ones it would be her! 

By the time her blue-collarizing project is finished, she will make him officially renounce his high class name Walter and start calling himself by the genune blue collar title "Big Wally".

Then the famously dignified Mr. Schwab himself would be due for a Mom makeover soon: "Charles Schwab" would have to say goodbye to those pinstripes and his company would turn into " Chucky's Place"!