This should be “Yes - always”. Otherwise, who’s interest are they acting in when they aren’t a fiduciary? Fiduciary fee-only advisors are legally obligated to put the interests of the clients first at all times.  Fiduciary financial planners owe a duty of loyalty and care to their clients.

Transparency builds trust. Our fee-only advisors charges you a set fee, which can be a monthly fee, a percentage of your investable assets under management, or a combination of the two. In any case our advisors can explain how they charge and show you their fees.

Fee-only planners cannot sell you insurance or investment products. Instead, they focus on providing you holistic advice around all your financial concerns. Most fee-only advisors will offer you advice in the domains of cash flow, risk management (insurance), education planning, tax planning, retirement planning, estate planning at minimum.

Many fee-only advisors offer you advice around the 6 main financial planning topics. There are, however, a few key aspects to consider before choosing and hiring one advisor over another:

· Do they specialize in areas of financial planning that are important to you? For example, do they know the ins and outs of the specific retirement plan that you are enrolled in?

· In your consultation call, do you connect with them? This is a relationship business. Feeling comfortable with the person on the other end is important.

· How an advisor charges makes the biggest difference.  If it is anything other than fee-only, you will want to ask how they earn their money.  

There are a few ways to interpret the response to this question, but the purpose of the question is really to give you an indication of how much experience the advisor has and how much time the advisor will have for you. There is a stark time demand difference when managing 20 clients versus 200.

Every financial planner must start somewhere, and you may be the start of someone’s career. This isn’t always a bad thing. Someone who is new is eager and is likely to go the extra mile for you. But it also means that you may want to ask a follow-up question such as “do you have a mentor/trainer/supervisor?”. We believe we are stronger together. That is why we created this network to collaborate with other fee-only advisors. Again, this is all about ensuring you are comfortable with recommendations you receive from the advisor.