5 things to look for in a good financial planner

When you find the right financial planner, you will be embarking on long-term relationship. So, what should you be looking for?

Someone who will give you time

The right financial planner will never rush their clients into making a financial plan. Their goal is to be able to say: “Yes, that’s it, we know what you want now, you can rely on us.”

That kind of confidence comes from genuinely attentive listening combined with the expertise to ask the right questions. It’s a process of guiding the client in the right direction, but moving at their pace. The end result is a deep understanding of each client’s hopes and fears; for themselves, their business and their families.

Someone who will work with the people you already trust

Financial planners are part of a network of fellow professionals – accountants, solicitors, private bankers. Every client can expect a good financial planner to introduce them to new processes, technologies and the specialist expertise of true lifelong financial planning, as an enhancement to the networks and relationships the client has already built. Warning bells should sound when encountering planners who ask their clients to abandon relationships with people they trust.

Someone who will give you confidence and clarity

Many people first meet financial planners at a time of change. There is a need for the financial planning process to make that change less stressful, simpler and clearer. At the same time the process needs to be challenging enough to give the client clarity about what they really want to achieve.

For example, a business owner who comes to financial planning believing that his 1st priority is to ensure his children’s inheritance, might realise that his own ambitions to travel matter just as much. A committed owner who sees income as offering opportunities to expand the business, might discover that his family’s dream of a holiday home overseas can be realised first. From that happy and relaxed base, even greater future business growth becomes possible.

The importance of true life-long financial planning is that it reveals these things and then makes them possible.

Someone who will tell you if it’s not the right time

A meeting should never come with obligations. There are many reasons why true financial planning might not suit every client, the first time they consider taking that step. A trustworthy lifelong financial planner will always be upfront about whether the services they can offer are the right ones for the specific situation the client is in. They will never take a client on unless they are completely certain that it is the right time for that individual to embark on the journey of true lifelong financial planning.

Someone who will be on your side, year in, year out

The best financial planners are looking to be there for their clients for the long haul. They know that protecting hard won financial security matters. They will want their clients to be leaving meetings nodding quietly to themselves and thinking: “Yes, I’m in the right place, they’ve definitely got my back.”