LT Trust

My experience with LT Trust was just fine for several years until last month. The company have now hijacked my assets without notifying me. For one month (so far), they have rejected my attempts to view, manage, or withdraw my own assets from them. They repeatedly refer me to a completely foreign company called Human Interest, but I never authorized Human Interest to take custody of my assets. I was never informed any intention to transfer my property to another company. What they're doing should be criminal.

It's like walking back to where I parked my car, but the car is gone and there's a ransom note telling me to contact a complete stranger to ask them about it. That stranger (Human Interest) then tells me that they're still waiting for LT Trust to complete this unauthorized transfer and there's nothing I can do about it.

How long would you be happy to have your car stolen from you?

They employ the fakest people. They used to be hood yrs ago . Now it's obvious the people they employ hate their jobs. They are very sarcastic in their responses when you ask questions trying to make you feel stupid.

There is NO customer service. Never return our phone calls or reply to my email.
Creative planning who they use for advice is also a sham! It's a robo adviser but they charge premium fees as if there are real adviser looking at your portfolio... Such a fraud.
We pulled our plan out from them just in time...

The customer service is terrible.

You probably won't have a choice of whether or not to deal with this company as they are typically selected by your employer as in my case. The website appears informative until you want to do something like make a withdrawal, then you have to email for them to only respond that they won't reply over email, so you have to call. Then you get "All of our representatives are currently serving other clients" for about 30 minutes before you speak to some one who has no authority to do anything, just tell you that they see your transaction is pending.

I should has expected as much because our company, which has been losing money for 3 years, always takes the cheapest vendor.

Also, it is the only company I know of that charges you $75 to take out your money from your account.

When I finally talked to a human, they did not understand what was wrong with their website. It turned out my employer entered DDMMYYYY format and they were expecting MMDDYYYY format so now my funds are frozen for 8 months. The website design is prehistoric.

If I had a choice, I would never do business with this company. I can't wait to get my money out and leave.

Follow up to response from LT-
I was not asking for the forms to be filled out for me, that would obviously a legal issue. There are large portions of documents that have been sent to me that I didn't need to bother with.
That said, I did get through that process and need no further assistance at this time, but I was deeply unsatisfied with the process. I have since been referred to Sonja and have been in touch with her regarding my brothers and my point of contact for our account. Since my first review, my brother and I have had to REMIND the woman managing our account to complete a tax document. That's a problem.

Non-existent customer service. Very very limited customization for your portfolio. Website portal is disastrous. Took over 6 months - calls, emails - to get a final answer on performance rate since inception of plan.

As the Sponsor of our company 401k account being held by LT Trust I have been progressively disappointed. Overall they provide almost no valuable service. They seem to be chronically understaffed.
It is the classic corporate scheme: Assign your best to the New Company Accounts and make sure they are very available. (Our experience getting set up was 4 star).
Next: Once account established turf them into your support call system that is so under-staffed that you can't get a call answered in a 8 hour period.
And for final: have a contribution system that is so error prone that every pay period is fraught with errors it requires multiple calls to the support call system.
Lather-Rinse-Repeat.
I would advise prospective clients to check elsewhere. The possible benefits, savings or whatever attracted you Lt Trust are not worth the headaches. Even my financial providers office cant get through to their support team without extreme pain.
Wish this review was based off of one frustrating experience. Its not. We have been clients for 2 years. The only thing keeping us there is the pain of leaving. Can you imagine trying to get your funds and documents transferred?

I see that I am not alone in my experience with being ripped off by this company!

This is the letter I am sending to my attorney about the complaint I am filing against LT Trust:

I am the founder of a non-profit corporation, so my only way to save money for retirement was to make investments when I could. In 1983, I invested $1500 with Pfizer. Over the years, Pfizer sold my plan to Resources Trust, who sold it to Lincoln Trust, who sold it to LT Trust.

I have a visual impairment and can not read all of the information on my statements, but periodically, I would call the company managing the fund and ask about my balance. Sometimes it went up quickly, sometimes slowly or not at all. At some point in the early 2000s, I remember calling and being told that the balance was $11,000 - it seemed like my investment was doing very well!

When I called LT Trust after looking at the last statement they had sent me, my eyes darkened! They had been charging me fees of $515 per quarter! The amount left in the fund after years of these fees was only about $1760! I called them and asked to be paid immediately, and they sent me a check for only $734, with hundreds of dollars in fees having been deducted - $50 for the check, $100 for liquidation, $100 for reception. I was even charged late fees - for what, I have no idea. Taxes had also been deducted, even though what I was receiving was much less than my initial investment over 30 years ago!

I called LT Trust again to ask for an explanation as to what had happened to all my money. I spoke to someone named Sonja - she didn't give me her full name or title. She was only able to access records going back to 2008, at which time there was just under $4000 in the account. I have a paper statement from 2007 showing that there was $6500 in the account, which was shocking enough, considering that when I had called a few years before, there had been $11,000 in the account.

How had the rest of the $11,000 from a few years before disappeared? It had been lost not through the ups and downs of the stock market, but because of LT Trust's exorbitant fees! In their defence, LT Trust says that they informed me of these fees. I don't know whether they had really made the fees apparent in my statements or not, since my visual impairment makes it difficult for me to read small print, and of course, I did not realize I needed to be going over the statements with a fine toothed comb to see if I was being informed that I would be ripped off!

I had called and checked on the fund in the early 2000s, over 20 years after the initial investment, and everything sounded good - the fund was making money, and the fees were about $100 per year. If I had realized in 2006 that I would be charged fees which would cause all of the money to disappear, of course I would have transferred my money to another account right away, or even cashed it out early and paid the tax penalty just to avoid being ripped off by LT Trust!

When I asked Sonja where I could file a complaint or how I could ask for mediation to dispute these fees, she was very evasive in her answers. I finally found out that I needed to bring the matter to the Labor Department under the ERISA Act, but was never informed whom to contact about the matter. Sonja never even told me her full name or title, and I couldn't find the information on LT Trust's website. A friend was able to find the information for me on the Better Business Bureau's page for LT Trust! She is listed there as Principal: Sonja Canacari, Lead Retirement Plan Specialist.

I think that LT Trust's practices are immoral and, perhaps, illegal. I think that they prey on people like me, ageing people who are counting on our investments for our retirement savings, who have no financial expertise, and who may have trouble reading our statements because of deteriorating vision, and who certainly aren't expecting the terms our financial arrangements to change drastically and shockingly, with no notice, or with the notice hidden carefully in a hard-to-read statement. I wonder if you have already had cause to investigate LT Trust for these predatory practices - I must assume that many people with my kind of disability have lost their retirement savings to this company over the last few years! Their Yelp page shows nothing but complaints about their bad business practices.

I want to dispute these fees and demand that LT Trust pay back the thousands of dollars which they took from my account under false pretenses. While they claim complete transparency, they treated me with complete evasiveness. Why don't they have records showing the history of the investment? My life insurance company can tell me when I started my policy with them, and that was in 1996! How come my retirement pension fund can not tell me when I started my account and how my balance has changed over the years? What are they hiding? Why did they hesitate to even tell me how to file a complaint?

Like the previous reviewer - set up was great, lots of support. Unfortunately, the workbook that they use to upload information is a temperamental thing, using an old Excel format. There is no way for you to unwind an upload that has even the smallest error - you have to contact support, and often wait for a response before trying to upload again.
I haven't yet had to work with a retiring employee or a loan, so no idea how that would go.
We went with this company because of their "low cost", but I am not certain we have saved any money. Will go through a year and see how filing the YE tax documents go before deciding to stay or transfer our account elsewhere.

I had a 401k run by a company called ForUsAll, but the funds are held and managed by LT Trust.

I left that job and tried to roll over the 401k - to do so, I went to LT Trust's site and requested a wire transfer of the funds. I received a confirmation email days later with no specific information about the transfer, but the funds hadn't shown up in my other account. I called LT Trust, but they said they wouldn't help me and told me to call ForUsAll instead.

I called ForUsAll, who had trouble getting any info from LT Trust. Eventually LT Trust said the wire was cancelled, but they provided no explanation. Several days later, after they were asked again, they said the account I put down could not receive wire transfers (which is incorrect). ForUsAll had them send a check instead. To make sure they got this right, I sent ForUsAll the instructions from Chase (my bank that would be receiving the transfer) on how to properly send a check. Even with explicit instructions in hand, LT Trust nonetheless sent me a check made out to the wrong payee and failed to include my account number on the check (which was specifically noted in the instructions). I'm now waiting to see if they can get it right the second time.

The fact that this company is responsible for the security of people's retirement accounts but hires staff that can't follow basic instructions is deplorable. Shame on you folks at LT Trust - you're really awful.