We financial advisors need to convince you that we know stuff about taking care of your money. One important way that we do this is by putting lots of letters after our name. Now some of those letters like CFP (Certified Financial Planner and ChFC (Chartered Financial Consultant) truly indicate a high degree of training and expertise. Some other letters after our names, pretty much just means we paid a fee to some organization and maybe took a simple test in return for permission to use of those letters, but they don’t really demonstrate that we know a whole lot more about financial matters than you do.
While some of us are really honest, highly trained in financial planning, and offer good advice, many of us are basically salesmen with little expertise in things financial.
Fortunately for some of us, prospective clients seldom carefully check us out. The letters after our name, and our smiling face is enough. A few overly obsessive prospective clients go as far as looking us up with the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA). FINRA provides some basic information on registered financial advisors, like how many years we’ve been doing this. It also tells you about any regulatory actions or complaints against us ( disclosures). Well, you can’t please all the people all the time. If you must, you can check out investment advisors and investment companies at the FINRA website https://brokercheck.finra.org/.
Check out some other ways we in financial services con, er help, our clients: