Meeting your new Financial Advisor for the first time…  Expectations / Goal Setting!

Once you’ve chosen the financial advisor you feel is best for you, what can you expect from your first meeting?  Every advisor is different, of course, but a few things will likely happen the first time you sit down with your new financial advisor.

Come prepared to ask and answer questions, and bring any documents that might be helpful (for instance, copies of wills and trusts, insurance policies, account statements, etc.).

At the meeting, your financial advisor will likely ask you detailed questions about your current financial situation.  Answer honestly, even if you’re not happy with where you are currently.  The more information your advisor has, the better he or she can meet your needs.

The advisor will also ask you about your future needs.

Before the meeting, think about where you want to be in terms of retirement (when do you want to retire, and what kind of lifestyle do you want to lead in retirement?). 

• Do you plan to pay for your children’s college education?
• Do you currently save anything, and if so, do you want to save at a higher rate?
• Do you plan to leave your job to start a business, start a family, or for any other reason?
• Do you have a will and other estate planning documents in place?
• Are you financially prepared for the unexpected, such as a job loss, illness or major life change?

These are all things a financial advisor needs to know.

Your financial advisor will talk with you about your financial goals.  Then, using all the information you’ve provided, he or she will come up with a plan to meet all your goals. 

That plan may include anything from getting on a budget to investing aggressively; it all depends on your unique situation.  Once you approve the plan, the advisor will implement it–and you can relax, knowing you’re one step closer to realizing your financial dreams.

NOTE: Experts recommend contacting 2-3 financial advisory firms, so that one may compare/contrast each firm, thus making the best-qualified choice.

Are You One of The Millions of Americans Making These Top 10 Financial Blunders Every Day?

There’s plenty of advice out there about what you should be doing financially. But what about the things you shouldn’t be doing, the financial blunders to avoid? Let’s look at our top 10:

1. Living beyond your means. If you’re using credit cards and equity loans to afford your lifestyle, or if you have several panicky days at the end of each month when the money runs out before the next paycheck, you’re headed for disaster. Living above your means will prevent you from saving for emergencies like a job loss, and what about retirement? You can’t solely depend on your pension or 401(k) to see you through the decades between retiring and dying. Stop spending now and talk to a financial advisor about what you need to do next.

2. Neglecting to save. This one is tied to living beyond your means for some; for others, saving is simply a vague plan that never quite materializes. Build saving into your budget, and to make saving easier, set up an automatic deposit each month into a separate savings account.

3. Living without a budget.  If you don’t have a plan for where all your money will go each month, you’ll almost certainly spend it all–and not necessarily on the things you should be spending it on. Not living by a budget and hoping you’ll meet your financial goals is like drifting at sea and hoping you come across a luxuriously appointed island.

4. Carrying credit card balances. This is an exercise in futility, particularly if you only make minimum payments. If you can’t afford to pay off your credit card in full each month, then you can’t afford to be using it. Carrying a balance just racks up interest payments that could have been used to earn money for you elsewhere.

5. Making impulse purchases. This is closely tied to living without a budget (and, often, living beyond your means). By definition, an impulse purchase is something you can live without–and although you can certainly budget for wants in addition to needs, random spending on non-necessities just makes you work longer and harder for the things you do need–like retirement or a college education for your kids.

6. Not communicating with your spouse about purchases. If the right hand doesn’t know what the left hand is doing, both hands are going to be wondering where their money went. Discuss purchases over and above the amount of any “mad money” you and your spouse get each month, and you’ll save yourself money and countless headaches.

7. Failing to keep track of your money. This is another one closely tied to budgeting. Do you rely on your online account summaries to tell you where your money is going every month? If you aren’t balancing your checking account to the penny yourself, how will you know if errors are made in your account? (It happens.) Or, for perhaps a more hard-hitting example, how will you know if you’ve accidentally spent your budgeted coffee money on new shoes?

8. Making late payments. If you must use credit cards or loans, never, never, never make a late payment! They will always result in additional fees and, often, in jacked-up interest rates–both of which are money down the drain. Because they’ll be reported to the credit bureaus, late payments will also adversely affect your future purchasing power for big-ticket items like real estate.

9. Neglecting to make goals and plans to achieve them. We talk a lot about financial goals and planning here at AllFinancialAdvisors.com, and there’s a reason: They’re the foundation of any solid financial plan. If you haven’t defined your goals, you’re not likely to reach them. If you’re having difficulty figuring out your goals, get yourself a financial advisor who can walk you through the process and develop a plan to help you meet them.

10. Not participating in company retirement plans (especially if your employer matches contributions).  If your employer matches any portion of your contribution to your employee retirement plan, that’s as good as free money and you should be taking advantage of it. Even if your employer doesn’t match, you should still be contributing to your corporate retirement plan to get the tax benefits.

Are there other financial mistakes you notice people making (or that you’ve learned the hard way to avoid)? Leave a comment and share them with our readers!

NOTE: Experts recommend contacting 2-3 financial advisory firms, so that one may compare/contrast each firm, thus making the best-qualified choice.

Financial Advisors: Not Just for the Wealthy

If you’ve held off from hiring a financial advisor because you just don’t have any money for someone to help you manage, it might be time to change your perspective. In fact, a Fee-only financial advisor or RIA can help you set your financial goals, create a plan for actually achieving those goals in your lifetime, and implementing that plan.

The fact is, you’ll need to save the same amount of money to put a child through college as you would if you were bringing home a few hundred thousand a year. It might be easier to save if your monthly income was five figures, but it can still be done even if right now you’re struggling to get by.

And that’s exactly where a financial advisor can help get you on track. Whether you have children who will someday go to college or not, you DO have financial goals (even if you’ve never sat down to think about them). Retirement is a financial goal. So is a vacation, a new car, an emergency savings account or a job change. And they all require planning. If it seems like your income will never be high enough to afford any of those things, we could argue you need a financial advisor every bit as much as a wealthy person does–because a financial advisor can actually help you save, and grow your savings, to meet goals you might otherwise only dream of.

Let’s face it: If you knew a lot about saving, investing and managing money, you’d already be doing it. But many Americans aren’t, and, like them, you might have no idea where to start. A good Fee-only financial advisor will sit down with you, analyze where you are right now and where you want to go, and develop a solid plan to get you there (provided you follow the plan). He or she will follow up with you periodically to see where you are, talk about what’s changed in your financial status or goals, and adjust the plan if needed.

Those are services you can use whether you’re already wealthy or not. And your chances of becoming wealthy–or at least more comfortably well-off than you are right now–will be greater if you have a financial professional in your corner.

 * * * Many of our advisors are members of the Financial Planning Association (FPA) and also the National Association of Personal Financial Advisors (NAPFA: the nation’s leading organization promoting Fee-Only comprehensive financial planning). Using the services of a qualified financial advisor (to help you identify the strengths and weaknesses in your financial picture) will ensure you can retire comfortably! NOTE: Experts recommend contacting 2-3 financial advisory firms, so that one may compare/contrast each firm, thus making the best-qualified choice.