When you’re thinking about hiring a financial advisor, here’s one tip to keep in mind: consider hiring a Certified Financial Planner professional. This special breed of advisor is required to take classes on various aspects of financial planning and has obtained a certification recognized as the standard of excellence for competent and ethical personal financial planning.
CFP® professionals must meet several certification requirements, including extensive training and experience, and they are continuously held to rigorous ethical standards. As fiduciaries, they’re also ethically bound to make recommendations in your best interest.
Here are 7 things you can and should expect your CFP® professional to provide and adhere to:
Your financial planner should take responsibilities seriously and place your interests over personal gain. The CFP® Board’s strict Standards of Professional Conduct is designed to ensure as much.
After careful consideration of your financial situation and objectives, your CFP® professional has an ethical obligation to provide you financial advice that best meets your needs.
The CFP® certification process requires completion of rigorous coursework coupled with mandatory experience levels. Continuing education requirements are designed to ensure this is an ongoing development process.
Your CFP® professional should make transparent all costs associated with advice and services, as well as explaining to you the potential risks involved with carrying out the plan.
Your financial advisor needs to ask you for detailed and private information about your financial life, but you can rest assured that information will only be shared when conducting business on your behalf.
For the areas of your investment plan that your CFP® professional does not have expertise, they should recommend other experts. For example, it makes sense for them to recommend money managers, tax advisors, estate attorneys, and so on to carry out the investment plan you’ve built together.
Before taking you on as a client, a CFP® professional should examine your financial situation to determine if he can assist you in building an investment plan to reach your goals. In other words, be cautious of other advisors too eager to get your business before they’ve even asked you about your circumstances and objectives.
If you’d like to meet one of our CFP® professionals or have one of them review your financial situation to make recommendations, please do not hesitate to give us a call at 1-800-541-7774. You can also get started on your own Investment Plan by answering a few brief questions here.
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