Financial planners were getting a bad rap and justified to a large extent. Too many “planners” are only masked salesmen, charged with directing their customers to high-cost products sold by the companies for which they operate.
But if you know where to look, there are useful financial planners out there, and a financial planner will make your life simpler in the right situations, save you a lot of money, and help you achieve your most significant personal goals faster. Your situation is going to be different, no matter how much information is available online, and it can be helpful to get personalized advice.
So when does it make sense to hire or not hire a financial planner? This article will give you a few examples of when you should and should not hire them!
When You Need Them
There are three primary financial questions to be answered by retirees and near-retirees:
1) Am I financially willing to retire?
2) How and when should I submit a Social Security application?
3) What is the best strategy to withdraw from my different pension accounts to meet my needs and make my money last as long as possible?
All these issues have a significant impact on your lifestyle in retirement, and none of them are easy to answer on their own. Everyone has a number of nuances and strategies that can be hard to understand or implement without the help of a professional who knows this inside and outside.
You start marrying a family, and you both add a lot of new financial challenges to children.
Through entering finance, handling the original cost of having babies, learning for the first time about life insurance, estate planning, and college savings, young families have a lot of financial pressures on their plate, and it can be challenging to balance it all. A good financial planner will help you navigate all of these tasks and prioritize them so that you can create a safe and enjoyable life for your family today and in the future. The financial advice for families would be a good start to look and navigate for a people-focused financial planner at this stage of life.
You are a massive money earner. If you’re a high earner, you may be able to save a lot of money, but you don’t know the right way to manage things and take advantage of the different tax cuts that are open to you. Not only can an excellent financial planner help you make essential decisions and propose tax-savings strategies, but it can also take over some of the execution and management duties, so you can concentrate your time and energy on making money and enjoying your life.
You are worked by yourself. Self-employed people tend to have a different set of financial issues and resources at their fingertips. There are multiple retirement accounts to choose from, more variable income, staff to take care of, and concerns about ownership and structure of the company. A financial planner who is specialized in working with the self-employed will have a deep understanding of all these issues and the planning opportunities that you have at your disposal. A right expert can help you make sure that you get the most out of your business, enabling you to build a more successful business and keep more of the money that you work so hard to earn.
You’ve got decent work with high net worth. High-net-worth people also have a unique set of financial problems. There is a unique skill set involved in managing a relatively large amount of money effectively, from maintaining huge balances distributed across various types of accounts to sophisticated property and tax planning techniques.
You have a particular requirement for preparation. Many situations require specialized knowledge that many individuals, and many practitioners, for that matter, don’t have. For instance, dealing with an unusually large amount of student loan debt requires a strong understanding of the different repayment options and other rules that overlap in confusing and specific ways. Having a child with special long-term needs involves a vastly different set of planning strategies that most people meet. If you are in a unique situation like this, having a financial planner with experience in that particular situation will help you make the right decisions.
