Once you have decided that you want a financial planner, finding a good one is the next step.
Like your personal financial situation, finding the right financial planner is a very subjective process – you need to find the best financial planner for you.
While you need to ensure your financial planner has a personality that you can ‘work with’, you need to remember you are looking for a fully qualified, licensed, expert professional that has your future interests and financial longevity at the forefront. You are not looking for a new best friend, nor someone to get horse tips for the next race at Flemington.
As such, you need to look through the veneer, peel back the blinds and ensure you use due diligence in the selection process of your financial planner – not just pick the first one that comes along.
Personal recommendations
Personal recommendations are always a great place to start, you may have a family member or friend who knows or uses a financial planner. However, this does not mean the recommendation is the ‘best fit’ for you.
A financial planner needs to be your financial coach, build your financial roadmap, and ensure they have your best interest at heart.
A personal recommendation may go a long way to achieving this goal, and it certainly navigates a lot of the time and effort that a full-scale search may entail. However, we always recommend getting at least one second opinion, meeting at least one other financial planner, if nothing else, so you can see who realises the best potential of your personal and financial goals.
Forums and Google Searches
A little bit of information is a dangerous thing, and nowhere more so than on the web. From uninformed forums, blogs and articles written by content writers with no experience in finance, no qualifications, and some with an axe to grind, many often looking to create ‘click bait’, or generate leads.
Although initial information searches are a great place to start, nothing counts more than meeting face-to-face, asking some tough questions of your ‘soon to be’ planner and ensuring things are online. Just as you should not diagnose your illness using ‘Dr. Google’, don’t put your financial future in the hands of a bunch of often misinformed - and ‘often angry’ - keyboard warriors’.
Professional recommendations
You may already have professional services that you know, use and trust. These could include accountants, lawyers, marketing, advisors etc. These professional services would often work with people within the financial sector, including financial planners.
It should always be noted that you, as the client and as the person whose financial future is at stake, should always conduct due diligence, ensuring that you are happy with your potential financial planner, not moving forward with engagement to appease your referrer.
Professional registers
In the wake of the 2019 Royal Commission into Misconduct in the Banking, Superannuation and Financial Services Industry, it was clear that governance of the industry, rouge financial services operators and exorbitant fees – in some instances for no service, and in other examples for the recommendation of products & services that were overpriced, sometimes leading to losses, or total losses of investors’ funds – were rife.
Although it was a vital step to ‘clean up’ the financial industry, the industry was tarnished with a broad brush, and even the very best operators within the industry were subjected to unfair assumptions & vilifications.
With the Financial Planners Association of Australia (FPA) as the industry body that works with financial planners to ensure they are compliant, regulated, upskilled and promoting industry best practice, in conjunction with the Australian Governments’ Smart Money website, there are lists or registers of financial planners that are available for review and contact.
The Smart Money Financial Advisors Register and the FPA’s Find a Financial Planner webpage provide some solace that you are protected by standards and governance levels that are required to be passed and upheld by the operators within the industry.
Although you are taking on financial advice and making the ultimate decisions yourself, if you choose an FPA planner, you at least know there is recourse and an industry body that governs the transactions and activities of their members.
However, ultimately, the advice that you take on financial matters is just that, and things can change. As mentioned, it is just important that you find a trusted planner that is ideally local to your home or office, that you have been referred to or has provided testimonials from current clients and finally is a member of the FPA or on the Smart Money register.
Transparency is the key in all your financial matters, just ask yourself…is this person looking after my best interests and can I see myself meeting with them in 10, 20 or even 30 years? If so, then you are on the right track.