When it comes to getting advice with your money, are you suspicious of financial advisors? How can you find one that you trust? We received another question from our Ask a Planner campaign on Facebook last week asking “Is Edward Jones looking out for the best interest of clients? Is it best to rather use a fee based CFP®?” Continue reading “Should You Use a Commission Based Advisor?”
When it comes to financial advisors, we often hear the term “trusted adviser” so often that we can take the “trusted” part for granted and forget just how important that trust is. This is someone we may entrust with some of our deepest and most intimate goals, our financial secrets, and our life savings. Yet, we often rely on very little to decide who’s worthy of that trust. We may choose an adviser based on who greets us at the nearest brokerage office, a cold call, a casual recommendation from an acquaintance, or even who happens to be sitting next to us at our child’s soccer game. Equally difficult can be the decision of when to fire an adviser we’re working with, especially if it’s been for a long time. Continue reading “Can You Really Trust Your Financial Adviser?”
I recently had dinner with a friend of mine who just got a job working for an investment brokerage firm. Yes, that means she’s going to be one of those commissioned brokers that I’ve warned so much about. (If they work for a brokerage firm, they’re a broker even if they call themselves something else.) Ironically, she was looking for some advice from me in getting clients and building her business. Did I tell her to forget it and join a fee-only financial planning firm? No. In fact, there are some very good reasons why an investor could be better off with a broker than one of the many fee-only advisers she’s competing against: Continue reading “Should You Invest with a Commissioned Broker? Maybe”
