1. Take stock of your current financial standing. List your assets against your liabilities to figure out where you are financially right now. Are you financially in the red or black? 2. Set financial goals based on your current situation. 3. Make financial decisions based on those goals. The salesperson scored himself five or so years of excellent commissions until we really recognized that this "investment" matched his goals way more than ours. We then ended our relationship with this salesperson and have followed this process with more success than failure since. You can now filter the firehose of information on investments based on where you are (assets and liabilities) and where you want to go (financial goals). This is not always easy to do, but it is simple and effective. My wife and I learned this valuable lesson the hard way almost 20 years ago when we were convinced by a savvy salesperson that we should invest in a variable universal life insurance policy.