The journal
Questions to ask any financial planner before you hire one
How they are paid, in dollars; whether they are registered and where; what they will not do; and what you will have in writing at the end.
AI-generated illustration. Not a real home or business.
An interview in both directions
A first meeting with a planner is an interview that runs both ways. The planner is finding out whether they can help; you are finding out whether you want them to. The questions below are worth putting to any planner, this practice included, and a good one will answer each without hesitating.
Write the answers down as you hear them. Answers that change between the first meeting and the agreement are worth noticing.
How are you paid, and by whom?
Ask for the answer in dollars: what you would pay in the first year, and what you would pay after it. Then ask whether anyone else pays the planner anything when you act on the advice: a fund company, an insurer, or an accountant or attorney they send you to. A planner paid only by clients will say so plainly. One paid partly by others should say who, and how much.
Ask, too, whether any part of the fee is a share of something, and of what. A fee that rises with your savings is one way to charge, and a planner who uses one should be able to tell you what it would come to in dollars for you.
Are you registered, and where?
Ask for the practice's name exactly as it appears in the public record, and for the names of the people who would work on your plan. Then look them up yourself, before you sign anything.
You can look up any real adviser, and the people who work for it, at adviserinfo.sec.gov, the SEC's public database, which covers advisers registered with a state as well. A real practice gives you its name exactly as it appears there; this demonstration practice will not be found, because it does not exist.
Ask what each person has passed or holds, and check it against the record. Letters after a name are easy to print and slower to check, which is why the record matters more than the website.
What will you not do?
A good planner knows where their work stops and says so before you ask. Ask who looks at an insurance policy, who prepares the papers for a will and who prepares a tax return, and listen for the names of other professions rather than a promise to do everything under one roof.
Ask, too, what the planner will not tell you. Anybody who says where markets are headed this year, or what your savings will be worth when you stop working, is guessing out loud, however sure they sound.
What will I have in writing?
Before you pay anything, ask for the agreement: what the work covers and what it does not, the fee in dollars, when it is billed, and how either side can end it. Ask what the finished plan will look like. A list of its sections and the questions each one answers is fair to see in advance; a sample full of somebody else's figures tells you little and promises too much.
A real New York planning practice gives you its Form ADV brochure, which describes its services, its fees and its conflicts, before or when you sign. This demonstration practice has none, and this site shows no sample of one.
How do you handle the pull in the way you are paid?
Every way of being paid pulls somewhere: toward selling, toward taking longer, toward keeping you as a client. A planner who says theirs has no pull at all has not thought about it, or hopes you have not. Ask what the pull is and what the practice does about it, and expect a specific answer.
What happens when it ends?
Ask whether anything renews by itself, how you end the agreement, and what happens to money paid for work not yet done. The answers belong in the agreement, in plain words, before you sign it.
How this practice answers them
The practice's own answers, in the same words it uses everywhere on this site:
Ask for a first meeting
A first meeting costs nothing, gives no advice and asks nothing of you afterwards: about forty-five minutes, at the office or by video. The office replies in office hours.