Downsizing, Financial Planning

Questions to ask a financial planner

I am noticing  more and more clients are wanting to work with financial planners to get the larger perspective on their financial condition and goals in light of our new economic conditions before they make any real estate decisions.  I think it is a great idea.

My wife and I have started working a couple of times with financial advisors, but found pretty quickly that they seemed to end up recommending vague insurance products as something we needed to have. When we researched the products, we found that they were mainly designed to provide good sales comissions, but not necessarily good results for the policy holders. Furthermore, the interest rates were pretty low, and the investments are not insured.

Another recommended a pile of  mutual funds that her company has. After she left, we compared all the fee-laden funds to simple index funds, and found that 8 of the 10 were outperformed by simple index funds! Now, with the recent Wall St fiascoes, we have been more reluctant to trust our savings to any financial firms at all!

So we have begun researching the idea of working with a fee-only financial planner. I would much rather pay a planner for their time and expertise and have them recommend products that are appropriate for me, not them. To select a planner, I would expect them to work like I do: ask a lot of questions, provide a lot of options,  stick with the process until we have a plan that makes sense, and provide monitoring along the way.

I came across this blog post that has questions to ask a financial planner, and found some of the questions pretty interesting.  Most of them relate to finding a planner who has similar values to mine, and one who practices what he or she preaches by doing personal investments in line with what they recommend for clients.

Does anyone else have any recommendations for planners, or how to find a good one?