Hiring someone to help with your personal finances is one of the most important and personal decisions you’ll make — and yet most advice on choosing one sounds generic or too short.
There’s a lot that needs to go into this decision, more than a 3 minute-read article will tell you.
If you’re like me, you start research by running run a Google search and investigate the top results. You’ll find brief articles written by firms that hope you’ll hire them. This raises an important question: What does unbiased guidance look like?
I went down this research rabbit hole myself. What started as a personal search—hiring advisors, interviewing others, switching multiple times, and trying to understand the industry—eventually led me to switch careers into this field myself.
This article is a distillation of what I learned along the way about how to evaluate, compare, and choose a financial professional who truly fits your life.
Before talking about how to find professional help, we need to ask a different question first:
Do you need professional help?
We’re living in the best era in history for free financial education. You can learn how to budget, invest, save, and plan from books, podcasts, blogs, YouTube, and complete strangers from the internet. For many people with straightforward financial lives, literacy is completely free.
But there are two areas where professional help can make a massive difference.
Some financial decisions are reversible.
Others are inflection points that shape the trajectory of your life.
When the consequences of getting these decisions wrong are large, long-lasting, or emotionally loaded, that’s when professional guidance becomes incredibly valuable.
Here’s what that looks like in real life: