Referral For Financial/Tax Planner In Orange County, CA
st...@lord-schein.com
I am looking for an experienced financial planner in the Orange
County, California area who can help me with my financial and tax
planning needs.
Please let me know.
Thanks in advance,
Steve
Gordon Waller
As you consider the solicitations you'll surely get regarding your post,
ask the solicitor if he or she works on commission. If you want to
receive help in these matters as well as understand what you're getting
yourself into, avoid commission based salespeople. Almost anyone can
call themselves a financial planner, and while there are many that are
true financial planning professionals, there are even more that will
attempt to convince you that insurance products can address any issue
you may have. The Certified Financial Planner (CFP) designation is one
that you'll want to look for, although there are also individuals with
CFP designations that sell only insurance and/or work on a commission
rather than charge you a fee for their expertise. Commission based
salespeople simply cannot be objective due to their need to meet sales
goals and sell the products that pay them best.
Keep an eye on the group. I'm sure I'll get some interesting responses
from my post. Think they'll be from salespeople? Good luck.
Edward Zollars
(HW "Skip" Weldon) wrote:
>Gordon, admittedly I don't have statistics available, but I
>rarely see CFPs who are NOT working on commission. And 90% of
>those who are not on commission are in money management - which
>carries a similar problem with objectivity.
What is probably the most important criteria is to
understand just what *is* the underlying bias imposed by the
compensation mechanism that your planner works under. And
all mechanisms do have a bias, though some are easier to
spot than others.
That is, in a "pure" fee for service setting (rare to find
in financial planning, but still) there is obviously the
bias to sell more services (you need more planning and more
often). That bias is relatively easy to spot and, for most
people, relatively easy to resist. If you were cynical, you
might decide that's the reason why this method is so rarely
used for 100% of the compensation <grin>.
What I would truly avoid are those that disguise their
compensation mechanism and/or suggest somehow that "you
don't pay for it" because the vendor of their product pays
them a commission. In financial matters, there truly is no
such thing as a free lunch.
Ed Zollars, CPA (AZ)
ezo...@primenet.com
http://www.getnet.com/~hmtzcpas
Edward Zollars
(HW "Skip" Weldon) wrote:
>It's because if you do it right - to me that means hourly rate,
>nothing besides advise-and-you're-out-of-the-picture - it takes a
>solid reputation and lots of clients to support the advisor.
>That requires years to develop.
>
>Most potential advisors, typically successful in sales or some
>other aspect of personal finance, are put off by the length of
>time it will take to reach that point.
I think there's also a psychological reason for this--those
who have been raised in a sales environment see the advice
(or any information) as a marketing tool, and not an end
product to be sold. When you are used to giving it away,
it's tough to change your mindset and start to treat that
advice as the truly valuable commodity, with the products
taking on a secondary importance. And, yes, in many ways it
does mean "starting over" for someone that has developed
sales skills.
The other issue is that the hourly rate needs to be set
high, because there is going to be lots of "nonchargable"
time (not allocable to any single client) that will be
undertaken to keep up to speed in these areas. That's a
fundamental difference between investment advice and my own
speciality (tax and accounting)--in the latter case, the
time is much more likely to be easily identifiable to a
single client. While the overhead is still there (keeping
up on law changes in general), it's not at the same level as
would be true for a financial planner.
Unfortunately, the same would be true for any financial
planner that tries to truly keep up with the broad
picture--and that would likely price them out of the range
of many that want to use them. So, as a practical matter,
many are going to end up using planners that work in a more
limited universe (the universe of the products they can get
a commission from selling). They will depend on their
upstream sources to provide them with the necessary
information to handle moving those products.
That's not to say you can't use that type of adviser--but it
will require some additional legwork by the buyer to try and
counteract the biases and limitations of that type of
adviser.
---
Ed Zollars, CPA Phoenix, AZ
ezo...@primenet.com
http://www.getnet.com/~hmtzcpas