Updated 1/15/2023

Are you working with a Financial Advisor? Do you want to, and you’re trying to find a good one? Either way, here are five questions to ask a Financial Advisor.

We will give you the five questions to ask and two questions to avoid. Then I will break down each question and explain:

• Why the question is important.
• What you should be looking for in an answer.

I will also link out to a bonus episode on my answers to the five questions.

The Questions

Here are the questions:

There are some dumb questions I’ve seen on other lists. Avoid:

Stay tuned to the full podcast to learn why the Five Questions are so important and what you should be looking for in an Advisor. I’ll also point out why the other two questions are dumb. Be sure to listen through the end, where I’ll give you an example of what answers to the Five Questions sound like by answering them from my planning practice perspective. This is a long one, but it is crucially important. Do not trust your life savings to someone without knowing the answers to the right questions. 

What’s a Financial Advisor?

I use the term “financial advisor” in this episode to represent all financial professionals. That is the term most people would use to classify them. But let’s break that down a bit first because there are important distinctions.

Financial Professionals that work directly with clients will generally fall into one of the following categories:

• Financial Service Representative
• Financial Advisor
• Financial Planner

A Financial Services Representative is typically an employee of a financial company whose primary role is to sell its financial products. FSPs will not offer many of the financial planning services you need unless the firm offers them. They may also be unable or de-incentivized to provide you with products and services outside of the company they represent.

A Financial Advisor will be able to offer a greater breadth of services than an FSP. Financial advisors are licensed to be paid fees for investment and financial advice instead of commissions only. Financial Advisors often focus on investments and insurance and may not have other expertise.

A Financial Planner will often be able to do all of what a Financial Advisor can do. They typically have more advanced training in areas other than investments and insurance. They will usually provide better advice on tax planning, estate planning, retirement planning, cash flow, and other topics. 

Now on to the Five Questions. Let’s take them one at a time.

Five Questions to Ask Your Financial Advisor

1. What are All the Ways You Get Paid?

Note the way I phrase this question. “What are all the ways…” Phrase it that way rather than “How do you get paid?” 

Asking it as a “How” question allows the professional to answer with a way they get paid. If they are less than forthcoming, they may give one answer when there are more methods that they do not disclose. 

What are all the ways a professional could get paid? There are four primary ways to pay a professional. Ask about any they left out.

Commissions

Companies pay commissions to financial professionals on the sale of insurance and investment products. They pay “hidden” commissions and “visible” commissions. 

Hidden Commissions

Hidden commissions are those paid to the professional that the client does not see. For example: when a professional sells a life insurance policy, the company pays them a commission as a percentage of the first year premium, and sometimes additional smaller commissions in future years. The client does not see these commissions directly. The contract does not spell them out. These commissions are typically 50-80% of the first year’s premium. 

Ultimately, the client is paying these commissions. In the case of the term life and disability income insurance, the company bakes the commission into the policy’s price. In the case of a cash-value life insurance policy, the commission also comes from the cash value’s delayed growth. It will often take a few years for that cash value to grow so that the company can recoup some of that commission they paid out. 

An Inherent Conflict of Interest

Commissions are not necessarily bad. Some people need products, and the only compensation offered is commissions. However, they are an inherent conflict of interest. If the company pays the professional for certain products, they may recommend those over better products. In particular, if a term life insurance policy costs the client $600 per year, and a permanent life insurance product costs $6,000 per year, the company incentivizes their professional to sell the permanent product. They will pay him ten times as much on the same sale.

Annuities have hidden commissions. The client typically doesn’t see a direct fee or reduction in the amount they invested into the product, but the company still pays the advisor a commission, either upfront or over time. Annuities typically have high fees to be able to pay out this commission as well as keep the insurance company profitable. They also impose “Surender Charges.” If you try and take your money out early, say within seven years, you’ll often pay a 7% or higher penalty on that withdrawal. That way, the company can recoup the commission they already paid to the professional.

Visible Commissions

There are also visible commissions, where you do see the commission coming out. The best example of this is A-Share mutual funds. The “sales charge” comes right off the amount you invest. If you invest $100 into an A-share mutual fund with a 5% sales charge, you will see $95 hit the balance in your fund. 

Again, commissions are not necessarily bad, but there is a clear conflict of interest. If the company pays the professional more to recommend something that is good for you than something that is best for you, the company will incentivize the professional to put their interest ahead of yours. More on that later under the fiduciary question.

Ask What the Commissions Are

If a financial professional admits to the company paying them commissions, they will usually skate right past it and change the subject. Don’t let them. Ask them to list out:

1. All the products they get paid a commission on
2. The exact percentages they are paid on each product type.
3. An example of the dollar amount they would be paid on a typical recommendation.

Then you know which products they are incentivized to sell, how to calculate what they earn to recommend it, and see for yourself how much you truly pay them.

Example Commission Schedule

Here are typical ranges of commissions:

Product	Commission %	Contribution Example	Commission $ Amount
A-Share Mutual Fund	3-6%	$1,000/m @ 5%	$600/yr
Disability Insurance	50%	$100/m @ 50%	$600 the first year
Life Insurance	50-100%	$1,000/m @ 85%	$10,200 the first year
Annuities	3-12%	$300,000 @ 7%	$21,000

You can start to see how much you are really paying, when a financial “advisor” works for “free” but is paid on commission.

Investment Advisory Fees

Financial Advisors and Planners charge Investment Advisory Fees as a flat percentage of assets under management to advise on those investments. 

A benefit to advisory fees over commission investments is that there is no additional money paid to the advisor to make changes or choose one fund over another. Therefore any moves they make are because they believe it will benefit the client and not to generate additional commissions. The advisor also gets paid more as the portfolio grows and less if it falls in value. This parallel helps align the client’s interests with the advisors.

Financial Planning Fees

Financial Planning Fees are paid by the client directly to a financial planner for advice and planning.

These fees compensate planners for their advice and time on all financial topics, allowing them to be less biased. If a professional only earns commissions or advisory fees, they have a great incentive to focus solely on those parts of a financial plan that pay them.

Benefits & Incentive Rewards

Benefits & Incentive Rewards can be awarded to professionals who meet specific quotas.

While I’m sure none of us would be upset at a professional trying to secure health insurance benefits for their family, it probably shouldn’t be at the cost of recommending terrible products to clients to meet sales quotas—more on this in Question 3. 

You can probably tell I’m biased towards fees over commissions. I believe that people should know precisely what they are paying and the value they are getting for those fees. To me, it’s a “duh” issue. I also challenge you if you haven’t been “paying” your advisor (meaning you’ve been paying them via hidden commissions) to re-examine your relationship. 

This idea of hidden costs is such an important point that I will do an entire episode on The True Cost of “Free” Advice later this season.  

Professionals can be paid through commissions, advisory fees, planning fees, and benefits. Make sure you discover which ways your advisor is paid. 

2. What is My All-In Cost for Working With You?

This question is closely tied to the first one, but from the other side of the window. The first one deals with how much money is flowing to the advisor’s pocket. The second one deals with how much money is flowing from yours! Depending on the layers of fees and costs, there might be a big difference. You should know all the costs to you, not solely the revenue to them. 

There are direct and indirect costs to you. 

Direct Costs

Direct Costs are those you will see if you peel back the onion. Let’s look at investment fees.

You ask an advisor the first question, “What are all the ways you get paid.” The advisor states that they get paid 1% of assets under management. You like the idea of the better alignment of interest that advisory presents over commission-based compensation. So far, so good.

Then you ask the second question, “What is my all-in cost for working with you?” This is where you find the hidden fees.

Hidden Fees

You dig in and find out there are several layers of fees, including:

Custodial and strategist fees often get added to the advisor’s fee. Perhaps they are 0.3% of assets, so the fee on the contract will show 1.3%. Expense ratios won’t show up as a line item like custodial and advisory fees. Instead, these fees simply reduce the returns you receive as the client. But they still add up. Perhaps in exploring the all-in fee, you discover that the expense ratios of the funds are 0.45%.

The first question gave an answer of 1%. Asking the second question resulted in an answer of 1.75%. That is your All-In Fee. 

Ask Them Both

Questions One and Two are not interchangeable. They are both necessary. Ultimately, you should be comparing All-In Fees from advisor to advisor and comparing what you are getting in return for those fees. Perhaps one advisor claims he only charges 0.5%, but all the additional fees that are tacked on launch the All-In Fee over 1.5%. That is no better than the advisor charging 1% directly with the same All-In Fee. And it stands to reason that the advisor who is charging more may be offering more. In that case, you might be getting much better value for the same All-In Cost. 

Always ask for the All-In cost, and press in if the answer seems to ignore these additional costs.

Indirect Costs

Indirect Costs are typically an opportunity cost or a potential cost. 

Opportunity Costs

People who are fee-conscious will often be duped into buying low or “no-cost” financial products to save money. No-cost indexed annuities are a good example. You put money into this product, and while it doesn’t get actually invested into the index, the value tracks the index. If the index price goes up 5%, so does the product. Often, these annuities have some downside protection that will take away some of your potential losses. And “best of all,” they are “free!”

So what’s the catch? There is a product that tracks an investment index with downside protection and no fee? Too good to be true, right? 

Opportunity Cost Example: Lost Dividends

Indexed annuities have opportunity costs. Since they aren’t invested in the index, they don’t receive dividends. They only track the price return of the index, not the total return (price return plus dividends reinvested).

When you invest in a true index fund, you are buying ownership shares of the best companies in the world. When they are profitable, they pay you, the owner, those profits as dividends. Dividends are an important part of the total return. Let’s look at an example. Here are the average annual price and total returns (dividends reinvested) over the thirty-year period ending in 2020:

If you invested $100,000 into an indexed annuity tracking the price return vs. an index fund as an owner of the companies and you reinvested the dividends, here would be the difference over that thirty years:

You are missing out on the opportunity to receive those and be able to reinvest them. Dividends aren’t guaranteed but are historically paid. There is a chance you won’t miss out on anything if dividends aren’t paid. But you are definitely missing the opportunity to receive them if they are. You have an opportunity cost.

Potential Cost Example: Surrender Charge

Many products also have potential costs. You’ll usually get a surrender charge if you try and pull the money out within the first three to seven years, depending on the product. This cost only occurs if you pull it out, though, so it is only a potential cost. If you’re 52 and aren’t going to spend any of your retirement money until you can do so penalty-free at age 60, then a six-year surrender period isn’t going to matter. 

They also often have caps. You get some downside protection if the market does poorly, but you’ll also usually give up some returns if the market does well. There are no immediate costs, but then a substantial potential cost depending on what the caps are. These products should be carefully evaluated to ensure those potential costs won’t end up being more than the direct costs of alternatives. 

Remember: There is no free lunch. There is always a cost. Find out what it is—the All-In cost. 

3. What are Your Insurance or Product Sales Requirements?

You may be spotting a common theme here. These questions are designed to root out conflicts of interest so that you can make the best choice. 

The heart of this question is to answer this question for you. Is this advisor recommending something because it is genuinely the absolute best strategy for your situation, or is it because they need to sell enough of that product to keep their job or earn a bonus? 

Managing conflicts of interest is hard when you have sales quotas and requirements to meet, even for the most ethical advisor. Many companies have quotas for keeping your job and additional quotas for benefits and bonuses. There are often internal sales cultures that promote and celebrate large insurance sales. Lavish vacations are given to those that sell the most products. The focus is selling insurance, not planning, investing, or helping clients. This culture is not always present, but it certainly is in many insurance companies. Certain insurance products are highly profitable for the companies and are strongly encouraged.

Don’t want Sales Quotas? Go “Fee-Only”

While quotas may be fine for some, you may decide, “I don’t want to work with anyone who has a sales quota to meet. I don’t want to deal with the constant conflicts of interest or feel like I’m being sold.” 

But how do you know? Here’s the key insight: If the advisor works for an insurance company, they have a sales quota. It doesn’t matter if the company also does investments, financial planning, estate planning, and everything else. If it is an insurance company, the advisors will have sales quotas.

Insurance-Based Companies with Sales Quotas

Here are some prominent examples of insurance companies that employ reps, advisors, and planners: 

• Northwestern Mutual
• MassMutual
• Mutual of Omaha
• Thrivent
• Prudential
• Guardian
• New York Life
• AXA (Now known as Equitable) 
• Securian

These companies produce insurance products and have an investment wing that manages or brokers investment products and services.

Beware of Masquerades

You will also want to look out for firms that are Doing Business As another firm name but are insurance companies masquerading as financial planning firms.

Perhaps the advisor works for Clarity Financial. That sounds promising until you check their website. In the disclosures at the bottom, you find the phrase “Insurance, Investment, and advisory services offered through Southeastern Mutual Life Insurance Company.” That’s the real company you will be working with. Queue sales quotas. 

You can research this question on your own, or you can simply ask the question. You may discover that your current advisor has sales quotas and that many of the recommendations you’ve received over the years have counted toward that quota. If that does not sit well with you, consider comparing your current relationship to other advisors. You may find a better fit elsewhere.

Eliminate Sales Quotas and Commissions from Your Search

If you want to eliminate all firms and advisors who have sales quotas and commissions from your search, here is the shortcut. You want a Fee-Only Fiduciary Financial Planner. These professionals never earn commissions or kickbacks and have no quotas or requirements. You can find the best one for you at FeeOnlyNetwork.com. Everyone on that site will be able to answer “none” to Question 3 – What are Your Insurance or Product Sales Requirements?

4. What Advanced Training, Designations, or Areas of Focus Do You Have?

This question becomes more important the more complex your situation is and the closer you are to retirement. That being said, it is still crucially important to have good advice in the early earning years. Being pointed in the right direction early will have enormous impacts on your life down the road.

Licensing and Sales Training

Financial professionals must be licensed to provide financial advice or sell products. However, having the license to sell products and services does not mean you know how to strategically use those investments and services in a client’s life. After you get your licenses, you know little about investing for actual clients and almost nothing about financial planning. Licensing is all definitions and theories. Then, you enter the real world. If you ever took a final exam in school to pass a class and realized that while you could regurgitate a bunch of facts, you didn’t learn anything to help your real life, then you know what I’m talking about. 

Most new professionals learn strategies and planning techniques from their sales training programs, sales managers, and wholesalers. They’re taught how to solve problems with products and how to sell those products. There is also a lot of emphasis on “overcoming objections,” meaning that when a client doesn’t like what you’re trying to sell them, you use tactics to get around those objections and convince them to buy anyway. Do you want a Financial Advisor whose only training is in sales?

Thankfully, there are many great educational institutions out there that provide excellent education and focused training on real-world planning and advice. And there is a wealth of experienced financial planners who have been passing on their knowledge and expertise. You’ll want to find an advisor with some advanced training, designations, or focus areas. 

Advanced Designations

Designations are very popular with financial professionals. You’ve probably seen the alphabet soup behind the name of an advisor. Designations make it easy to spot what training and education an individual has completed.

Terrible Designations

Do some research on designations, or at least on the designations of the advisors you are thinking about hiring. Be sure that the designation the professional has would be useful to you. Some of them would be completely irrelevant.

The CLU® designation is very popular, and you will see that quite a bit. It stands for Chartered Life Underwriter® and signifies that a professional has extensive knowledge of life insurance, particularly permanent life insurance. That might be very helpful to some people. For others who may want to have their basic term life insurance needs met but do not want or need permanent life insurance in their portfolio, this designation would not help. 

Or what about CLF®? “Jack Johnson, CLF®.” Sounds important. It sounds like he would have some heavy expertise in my financial planning.

CLF® stands for Chartered Leadership Fellow®, and it is for financial services managers. It teaches them how to operate financial services offices better. It’s not a bad designation at all! It simply has nothing to do with financial planning or advice to clients. 

So just because they have letters behind their name doesn’t mean it will help you. Do your research. Or, when you ask them this question, be sure to have them elaborate on any designations they have and how they might help you.

The Gold Standard Designation

The CFP®, CERTIFIED FINANCIAL PLANNER™, the designation is widely recognized as the gold standard for holistic financial planning advice. It is expensive to get the training, time-consuming to learn and finishes with a grueling six-hour exam. That exam makes those 45-minute final exams we took in college look like a pop quiz. It also requires three years of experience and rigorous continuing education to ensure that CFP® practitioners don’t lose their edge. To make sure that practitioners adhere to their exhaustive code of conduct and standards, the designation is administered by the CFP® Board. If you want the whole package, a CERTIFIED FINANCIAL PLANNER™ is the way to go. 

Perhaps second would be the Chartered Financial Consultant (ChFC®). They have training in many of the same areas, but perhaps not to the depth of the CFP®. And there is no equivalent to the CFP® Board. 

Working with a CFP® will often be “more expensive” than working with someone less experienced or knowledgeable. I have that in quotes because ignorance and inadequate or wrong advice can be much, much more expensive. If you pay a CFP® $100,000 more over your lifetime than a simple advisor, but you end up with $500,000 more due to better tax, risk, and investment planning, was it really “more expensive?” Again, we covered this in The True Cost of Free Advice episode.

5. What is Your Investment Philosophy? 

The purpose of this question is to help you distinguish between different advisors and to hopefully identify a philosophy that resonates with you and that you could see yourself believing in and following. You may get a wide variety of philosophies, or they may all sound the same. I can’t tell you what to look for because, unless I know you personally, I don’t know you and can’t say what might appeal to you. But I can give you some items to consider as you listen to various answers. 

Beware of the Risk Tolerance Questionnaire

There is a common practice these days to invest clients’ money based on their Risk Tolerance. The premise behind it is somewhat sound. The idea is that if a client’s portfolio is “riskier” than they can handle, they might panic out of it at the worst possible time and lose tons of money. This sounds reasonable, but it doesn’t work in practice.

You will be invested based on a Risk Tolerance Questionnaire, instead of your Risk Tolerance. A new client will answer ten multiple-choice questions on a form that might take about five minutes. The professional will then take the answers to those ten questions and generate a score. Based on that score, they will select a model portfolio from a series of them and invest your money accordingly. 

In case you missed that, you will spend five minutes on a questionnaire that will determine the rest of your investment life! 

The Stupidity of the RTQ

Suppose you went to see the doctor, and they said, “Here are ten multiple-choice questions that we give everyone. Fill it out; it will tell me exactly what disease you have. Then I’ll prescribe a medicine.” 

No tests, no conversations, no education. Diagnose yourself, and we’ll give you a drug. 

Ridiculous. 

With something as important as your health, they don’t let a five-minute multiple-choice questionnaire determine your treatment. So why do we do that with your entire investing life! Why are we, as investors, content with this? 

So if the answer to the investment philosophy question is, “We determine your goals, and then invest you based on your risk tolerance,” you may want to keep looking. For more, check out Episode 21: Risk Tolerance is Stupid!

Beware of Grand Promises

It would also be a red flag to me if the answers sounded like any of the following:

“We use a strategic method to get you into the market when it is doing well and then get you out of the market before a big crash.” 

No one can do that. 

“Through our rigorous process, we’ve identified the best funds that will outperform the market in the coming years.”

Again, not possible.

“We provide above-average returns while minimizing your risk.”

Ditto. 

“We have strategies and products that can protect your wealth and guarantee an income for you, so you don’t need to risk it all in the market.”

Listen to Episode 2, and then decide if that philosophy still sounds acceptable to you. 

Overall, this question may elicit some interesting answers, and some may entice you. If you are entrusting the growth of your lifetime savings to someone, you should probably know their philosophy.

Recap

The Five Questions are:

1. What are all the ways you get paid?
2. What is my All-In cost to work with you?
3. What are your insurance or product sales requirements?
4. What advanced training, designations, or areas of focus do you have? 
5. What is your investment philosophy? 

Dumb Questions to Avoid

I also eluded to a few dumb questions to avoid asking. Let’s hammer those out quickly. 

A. Are you a Fiduciary?

Many blogs recommend that people ask this question, but it’s a dumb question. Don’t misunderstand, you definitely want to work with a fiduciary. But asking someone is a fiduciary is like asking them if they are honest. What are they going to say? “No?” I don’t think so.

I addressed this extensively in Episode 88, What is a Fiduciary? Click that link and read or listen to that next. But in case you don’t, here’s the short version.

What is a Fiduciary?

There are two standards that financial professionals can meet. They must meet one of them when dealing with clients’ money.

The Suitability Standard

The Suitability Standard means that a recommendation is suitable for the client’s situation. As long as it is good for the client, the professional can recommend it. 

This is a relatively low standard. There are no financial products that are outright harmful to clients. They are almost all “good” for clients when appropriately used. 

The problem is that the Suitability Standard allows blatant conflicts of interest. If Option A is best for the client, but Option B is good for the client and pays the professional more, the professional can recommend Option B. It is suitable for the client and therefore clears the standard.

The Fiduciary Standard

The Fiduciary Standard means that a recommendation is in the client’s best interest. It has to be the best-known product or strategy for the client. Let’s revisit the Option A/B scenario from before but under the Fiduciary Standard. Because Option A is better for the client, the professional is required to recommend it over Option B, even though the professional will get paid less.

Professionals that use fee-for-service financial planning recommend based on your best interests. If they manage investments under the fee-based advisory model, they must manage those in your best interest. The selling of commissioned products falls under the suitability standard. 

Of course, you want a professional operating under a Fiduciary Standard, not a suitability standard. This is another “duh” scenario. Why would you possibly want advice that might be in the advisor’s best interest and not yours?

It’s a Dumb Question

If the Fiduciary Standard is so much better (it is), why is this a dumb question?

It is dumb because of how the question was asked: “Are you a fiduciary?”

If the advisor manages investments for a fee then they are a fiduciary for those managed assets. So they can answer, “Yes, I am a fiduciary.” 

But, they may also sell financial products in the rest of their strategy that are merely suitable. Because they could and did answer, “Yes, I am a fiduciary,” you now believe that all their recommendations are in your best interest. But they may not be. 

You can’t discover if they are a fiduciary just by asking them. Again, read or listen to What is a Fiduciary to find out more and to learn how to find a fiduciary.

How to Find a Fiduciary

If you want to find a Fiduciary, a true Fiduciary, then go to FeeOnlyNetwork.com. Everyone there is a Fee-Only Fiduciary Certified Financial Planner. They only get paid fees by you, the client, and thus, everything they do is under the fiduciary standard. No commissions. No perverse incentives.

B. What is your investment performance track record?

Frequently recommended, this is another dumb question. Here’s why.

There is no evidence for the persistence of performance. Find me an advisor who is bragging about their track record, and I’ll find 1,000 portfolios that outperformed it and 10,000 examples of money managers who were outperforming and then proceeded to underperform. 

Invest based on proven principles, not past performance. The disclaimer: “past performance is not a guarantee of future results,” is required on all performance statements, for good reason. Keep this question out of your list, as the answer is irrelevant. 

Finally, to wrap up, let’s give you some examples of how answers to these questions might look. Let’s go through each of the questions, and I will answer them from my planning practice perspective. These are the real answers for that practice. 

Freeman’s Five

Freeman’s Answers to the Five Questions

What are all the ways you get paid?

My team and I at La Crosse Financial Planning are Fee-Only. You (the client) pay us. That means we receive no commissions or kickbacks of any kind. We are not incentivized to recommend one strategy or investment over another. We charge either a flat monthly fee or a percentage of assets billed to your accounts. For one fee, all of the company’s services are offered, and it’s the only way employees get paid, as enforced by NAPFA, the largest Fee-Only organization.

What is my All-In cost to work with you?

Five Questions to Ask Your Financial Advisor

You pay us one fee for all our services: financial and retirement planning, investment management, tax planning and prep, estate planning and execution, and insurance advice. We use low-cost index funds, which have low expense ratios. You only pay our fee and those low investment expenses. There are no other costs. We value transparency and put our money where our mouth is. Find the current fee at LaxFP.com/Pricing.

Do you have insurance or product sales requirements?

Five Questions to Ask Your Financial Advisor

None. Banks, insurance companies, and broker-dealers do not own Independent Fee-Only Fiduciary Firms, like us, so we have no quotas. We do not sell any products. We provide insurance advice but no insurance products.

Do you have any advanced training, designations, or areas of focus?

I have the Certified Financial Planner™ Designation, the gold standard in comprehensive financial planning. Everyone on our team has the designation or has passed the exam (awaiting other requirements to use it). I also have the Enrolled Agent license to represent taxpayers before the IRS, give tax advice, and prepare tax returns. You will never hear from us, “I can’t answer that. Go ask your tax advisor.” I focus on working with folks over fifty to help them retire successfully and stay successfully retired through comprehensive financial planning and behavioral investing. Michael Swartz, CFP®, works with Medical Professionals, and Ben Gibson, CRPC®, works with millennial and Gen X clients.

What is your investment philosophy?

We invest based on principles, not predictions. Such a philosophy is not able to explain in this small of a space. However, I explain it more face to face. Our second (free) meeting with a new client is our Strategy Session. We usually demonstrate our investment strategy there. You can also learn about our strategy in my book, 3D Retirement Income, Creating a Retirement Income that Outpaces Inflation, Outlives You, and Outperforms Others. You can get it in paperback, hardcover, ebook, or audiobook for free at RetireMentorship.com.

Conclusion

There you go. You just asked the Five Questions to a Financial Planner. One down. If you have an existing advisor, ask them these five questions. You can find the list at RetireMentorship.com/5. Then, find one more professional, preferably an advisor or planner, and ask them the questions. After that you will have three sets of answers. From there, you can decide if your current advisor is still the best for you or if you should explore a change. 

If you have questions about this topic or any other topic, you can send an email to Questions@RetireMentorship.com. Or you can call us at 1-855-6-MENTOR (663-6867) and leave a voicemail. We will respond to you directly, and if we get the same question repeatedly, we’ll turn it into an episode.

This article is educational only and is not intended to be investment, legal, or tax advice or recommendations, whether direct or incidental. Again, this is not investment advice. Consult your financial, tax, and legal professionals for specific advice related to your specific situation. Never take investment advice from someone who doesn’t know you and your specific situation. All opinions expressed in this article are those of the people expressing them. Any performance referenced is historical and is no guarantee of future results. All indices are unmanaged and may not be directly invested in.