I saw all of the great postings about Primerica here and I felt I needed to post my own warning about how I got conned into going to a meeting.
I was told I was going to a seminar about financial opportunities for women. I questioned it a little more but my friend was rather evasive who invited me. I was okay with that because she was busy and I chalked it up to that.
Long story short; I went, I knew nothing about Primerica but right away the whole thing set off alarms for me, one being that I was looking at some sort of pyramid scheme. I was told to "take notes" during the presentation because there was a lot of information and it would be very overwhelming. NOTHING in that presentation was overwhelming unless, and forgive me for saying this, you don't have much of an education in anything financial.
You see, I was a psychology major for a long time and even though I changed majors and got a degree in something else psychology still fascinates me, particularly cults and manipulative group think. These people had it going on in spades, and the whole line about how they just want to help women get ahead made me want to vomit. It is an insult to women everywhere that they are preying on them as such rubes.
I asked lots of questions, none of which I received very satisfactory answers for. They went through a lot of the same routine described in other posts here so I won't go into it. Needless to say the point in the evening came where they wanted me to fill out an application and give them a check for $200. I told them I have a personal rule that I never make a decision like that without thinking it over at least for 48 hrs and I asked if I could take the application home. They absolutely refused, which of course set off the final alarm bell for me. As soon as I got home I googled them and found this site.
I called everyone that I had put on the contact list they had me fill out and informed them not to do any business or give any info to these people. But of course, they keep calling me, always when I'm out so I just get the voicemail. One did catch me the other day and the way she talked down to me was so insulting I was shocked. She asked me if I was "intimidated" by the information I had been presented with, in other words was I not smart enough to understand their grade school finance lesson. I about choked on my sheer disgust. Look, I'm a nice fairly easy going person, and I think for some reason people think that makes me a push over. I think she thought this too and went way, way to far in treating me like just another mark.
I hate to say this because it sounds elitist but they really prey on under educated desperate people. I have a college education and I like to think I'm somewhat intelligent so I was just amazed at the way they talked down to those women in the room and me on the phone. It was just amazing.
I'm not going to argue about why they are a scam, there are others here whom have done so much better than I ever could, not to mention I'm about half asleep as I'm typing this. I just wanted to get the word out there about this new little "angle" of theirs. It's disgusting. How many of those wmoen had kids and couldn't afford to lose the time and that $200? It just makes me ill.
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