If you want money advice you can trust, your best bet is to hire a fee-only financial planner. The trick is finding a planner who’s willing to be hired for a reasonable fee.
Fee-only planners don’t accept commissions or kickbacks and are paid solely by client fees. Most use an “assets under management” model where they manage their clients’ investments and charge an annual fee of about 1 percent. To make the math work, these financial planners usually require people to have hundreds of thousands of dollars to invest. Otherwise the advisers would reap too little from their fees to justify the hours spent creating financial plans.
This is obviously a problem for people who don’t have enough assets. In my latest for the Associated Press, how to find financial advice that isn’t based on the size of your portfolio.