Choosing Your Financial Planner?
Wealthy Choices®LLC
Penelope S. Tzougros, PhD. ChFC, CLU
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Choosing Your Financial Planner?
When you want to do the right things with your money you need to ask
the right questions and you need answers that fit your particular
circumstances.
For example, when you ask, “Where can I find the lowest mortgage
rate?” you can find that answer by talking to friends who have just taken
a mortgage, by asking a librarian to guide you to the appropriate
resources, by searching the Internet, or by looking in a newspaper that
lists the lenders in your area and the current rates being offered on fixed
15-year, or 30-year mortgages or adjustable rate mortgages. The next
question is the more difficult one: Which one is right for your
circumstances?
Now you are moving toward making a financial plan. When you are no
longer satisfied with the answer to an isolated question (like what’s the
lowest mortgage rate) and are coordinating that answer with other goals
and other decisions, you are beginning a plan. You may be content to
work on this by yourself or with another person in your household.
You may feel that no one can take care of your money better than you
can. In which case, you owe it to yourself to keep learning and reading
so that you can make better decisions. If, however, you decide to hire a
financial advisor, how do you check out a good one?
List of Candidates
Who do you ask? Ask everyone you know and respect for their
evaluation of whomever they work with. Ask an accountant or attorney
for names of people they recommend and ask why they recommend that
person. As long as you do more thorough questioning, you can use any
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other source as well, like an adult education catalog that offers courses
near you, a seminar teacher, a teacher in a business department, the
yellow pages, Internet search engines. Any of the institutions that runs a
program for training financial planners is a resource for you. These
in