Mike MilliganFounder and CEO, 1.oak Financial · Founder and CEO, 1.oak Financial

Are You Working with a "Fake Fiduciary"? | A Warning for Retirees (feat. Tom Hegna) #Fiduciary

25 Sept 2025 · 1 min

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In this excerpt from his YouTube video, financial planner Mike Milligan references Chapter 4 of his book One of a Kind Financial Plan, which he insisted on publishing despite his publisher’s hesitation. He explains that a true fiduciary is an advisor who employs every appropriate financial tool—"all the clubs in the bag"—rather than relying on a single product or perspective. Using a hammer‑and‑screw analogy, Milligan argues that an advisor who only offers fixed index annuities or only manages investments while dismissing annuities is not acting as a genuine fiduciary. The segment serves as a warning to retirees and other investors to seek advisors who take a holistic, tool‑agnostic approach to financial planning.

Chapters

In the One of a Kind Financial Plan book that I wrote, uh, my publisher, when I wrote the book, they actually said, are you sure you want to publish chapter 4? And I was like, absolutely, I want to do it. Chapter 4 talks about what a true fiduciary is, and it's another way of saying what you just said, right? Like using all the clubs in the bag. Like, to me, a fiduciary is if all you have is a hammer and you see a screw and you use it, you're not really a true fiduciary. Right? So like financial professionals who all that, like you said, only have fixed index annuities and that's all they offer and that's all they see as a solution, that's not really a true fiduciary, right? Somebody that only manages investments and they'll say annuities are bad, that's not a true fiduciary.