Questions to Ask Your Financial Advisor

Questions to Ask Your Financial Advisor One of the best things in the world you can do when it comes to hiring on any kind of an advisor - a financial advisor, insurance broker in NJ, investment broker or anything else is to simply open your mouth and speak. When it comes to an advisor, they are there, of course, to benefit you (and themselves) but sometimes in order to find the best advisor, you need to weed out all the ones that aren't good for you in order to find one that IS good for you. In order to do this, you might have to ask some pretty tough questions, but you can guarantee that if you ask them, you will find the best advisor for your needs in the long run. Here are some you should consider asking when meeting with an advisor for the first time.

How Do You Stay Up To Date On Current Data?

This is less about finances and money, but its important that no matter who you choose, that they have some sort of an active standing in things like meetings, seminars, conferences, conventions, etc to keep up to date with the current information in finances, current trends, etc. You can also ask them about their education, background, why they got into financial planning and advising and any concurrent training they may do. It might seem a little personal, but this is a person that is going to be essentially wheeling and dealing your hard-earned money.

Communication Is Key One of the things to remember about advisors is that they are giving you a service - and they make a commission from this as well, so its in their benefit to work with you as well.

Instead of finding yourself an advisor who sells you his pitch and then moves on, you want to find a person that will connect with you on a weekly, monthly or even yearly basis and let you know what's going on with your investments. You also need to make sure that they follow up after the "interview" for any questions or concerns you may have had but didn't think to ask at the time. This goes to show this person is a professional and actually cares about your business.

Compensation For The Advisor

I'm sure your mom or dad always told yo to never ask how much money someone makes, but, in this case, there is the exception. You need to be aware of how the advisor makes their part of the money from your business. A lot of people seem to think that they only make money if you do, but this is not true at all. In a lot of cases, they get paid by sponsors - and this payment is quite attractive.

Referrals, Reviews and Recommendations Yes, you can ask your advisor for recommendations and referrals, but you should also take point with this and go online and search for reviews as well. Reviews are pretty telling - if you see reviews for a person that are mostly positive, chances are they are a good advisor and a trusted person to deal with your money. On the other hand if you are seeing a lot of negative reviews, it might be a good idea to start looking someplace else for someone else.

Put Your Money Where Your Mouth Is One of the best questions you can ask the advisor is if they use the same products, tactics, techniques and services for their own investments, that they will be recommending you use or buy. If an advisor is giving you advice on money matters and yet they don't even use those techniques or products themselves, one has to wonder why.

Another question to consider asking is about what the were doing back in 2008 - in the Great Recession. Were they still investing people's money? Were they making money back then? What techniques of any did the recommend to their clients IF they had any back then? Did any of their clients pull out because of fear? These are all questions you can and should be asking, especially since 2008 which such a dramatic and traumatic experience that many people are still trying to overcome.