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Our money is very personal. We tend to be too private about it and rarely open up and share our financial skeletons, mistakes, what keeps us up at night, how much we earn, how much we have, and so on. How many people are you really open about your money to?
This is the challenge and opportunity. Most of us need help understanding and managing all aspects of our money, but we have one major obstacle preventing us from getting help: a lack of confidence. It’s scary to open up and let someone into your financial life, so we tend to not let others in and then suffer the consequences of not getting the professional help we need to get the desired result. get results.
Connecting with a financial advisor is a lot like dating. Ever been on a first date that went bad? Most of us have! We can learn a lot from the dating process when it comes to finding the right financial advisor for us. Here are three things to consider when looking for and hiring a financial advisor so you can take control of your money and take action to improve your finances.
Related: The pros and cons of hiring a financial advisor
Where we find our financial advisor matters
When we are ready to enter into a serious, long-term, and trusting relationship, whether that be marriage or with a financial advisor, we tend to look to sources of credibility that inspire trust. I like to compare this to finding your life partner through eHarmony vs. Tinder. Both offer a service that people are looking for, but the experience and results are arguably very different.
When looking for a financial advisor, we have a similar situation. Finding a financial advisor by getting an ad on Facebook and then being bombarded with cold calls doesn’t feel quite right. It doesn’t exactly give us the confidence we need to be open about our money. Would you marry an advisor you found this way?
Instead, people should look in places where a community of advisors already exists, such as that of the CFP board Let’s Make A Plan employ. Like dating, this helps us know we’re looking in the right place to find that first date we really want. But it creates another problem: how do we choose the right advisor for this first date when we have hundreds to choose from?
How we choose our financial advisor is important
Ever heard of the jelly conundrum? Basically, if we get more than five jelly choices on the supermarket shelf, we shut down and choose none of them. The same is true when trying to figure out which advisor to choose. Presenting a list of hundreds of potential advisors is overwhelming, we just won’t choose one. Imagine having to choose your first date from over 100 people, forget it!
The importance of advisory involvement is becoming increasingly important. It’s essentially how well an advisor connects with us and listens to us, which in turn builds confidence so that we will take action. Connecting with a financial professional is paramount as getting help with our money requires us to open up and take action.
If we don’t have a deep understanding with our advisor chances are we won’t open up about our money let alone take action based on any recommendations they have for us so the first step is to find and connect with an advisor we can trust. We know about the choice paradox that we won’t make a choice if we have too many options to choose from, so we need to find a place or service that helps us narrow down the choices from hundreds to three or four.
Our brains can handle this. The challenge here is that most “fine-tuning” processes only let us narrow down through things like where we live or the type of references an advisor might have. Both are useful, but we don’t connect to other people based solely on our zip code.
How to get in touch with a financial advisor matters
I love this quote from former president Theodore Roosevelt: “Nobody cares how much you know until they know how much you care.”
When dating to find your life partner and get married, your first and second dates will cover topics like your interests, your background, what you went to school for, what you like to do for fun, etc. We talk about these things because we being wired to connect with other people like us based on a variety of shared similarities, philosophies, interests, etc. But eventually we get to the topics of money, work, mistakes, quirks, family baggage and so on. In other words, once we know we like each other, we start delving into the less glamorous but equally important topics.
The same should happen when we are looking for and trying to get in touch with a financial advisor. It is important to get to know your advisor on a human level first. Do you like each other? Do you have common characteristics, etc.? Once you feel like you could work with a particular advisor, you can delve into more business questions to ask.
People have to search ways to connect with their financial advisor as they would with someone they could date. Do you have common similarities, experiences, interests and philosophies? Connecting on these levels sets the stage for trust and openness about your money. Confidence is a by-product of what I call human dimensions. Once we’ve connected to these dimensions, it becomes very important that the consultant we’re considering has the experience and credentials to best assist us – hence the Roosevelt quote above.
Relationships are important. Consider these three tips when it comes to finding the best financial advisor. Getting help with your money is just as important as where and from whom you get the help.
