What do you need to know about your financial planner?

Q: What should I expect of my financial planner because I want to know what are my rights with him – what can he help me with? What would you say to that?

A: All good financial planners and who have really doing a good financial planning practice will have either an engagement letter or some sort of an agreement or a consulting agreement or an engagement agreement or whatever they call it. But that agreement could be one page to three pages or five pages and which will exactly spell out your rights, what your responsibilities are, what your duties are, what the planner is suppose to do and what he is not suppose to do. Some people just give you consulting advice, some people just make a plan for you and they do not sell you anything, some people are very clear and say that if you buy something from me then only I will give you advice. Some people are I am only going to sell. That is how even the fee models are different for different people. Someone is fixed, someone is floating, somebody is charging you a percentage so the best thing that one should do is one should shop around, one should meet 5-6 people, it is a very important decision of ones life. Therefore, why not meet 5-6-7 different people and see with whom your bandwidth matches. Who has the same sort of ethics and philosophies like you and where there is some sort of a marriage between the two different schools of thought and one feel that this is a workable relationship, go ahead and try it out. One has no restriction, one has no imposition or no bars that one cannot exit. One can close your relationship after a few years if one is not happy with it.