Financial Planner

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A financial planner or personal financial planner is a practicing professional who helps people deal with various personal financial issues through proper planning, which includes: cash flow management, education planning, retirement planning, investment planning, risk management and insurance planning, tax planning, estate planning and business succession planning (for business owners).


The work engaged in by this professional is commonly known as personal financial planning. In carrying out the planning function, he is guided by the financial planning process to create a financial plan; a detailed strategy tailored to a client's specific situation, for meeting a client's specific goals. The key defining aspect of what the financial planner does is that he considers all questions, information and advice as it impacts and is impacted by the entire financial and life situation of the client.

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Objectives

People enlist the help of a financial planner because of the complexity of performing the following:

• Finding direction and meaning in one's financial decisions;
• Understanding how each financial decision affects other areas of finance; and
• Adapting to life changes to feel more financially secure.

The best results of working with a comprehensive financial planner, from an individual client or family's perspective are:

• To create the greatest probability that all financial goals (anything requiring both money and planning to achieve) are accomplished by the target date, and
• To have a frequently-updated sensible plan that is proactive enough to accommodate any major unexpected financial event that could negatively affect the plan, and
• To make intelligent financial choices along the way (whether to "buy or lease" whether to "refinance or pay-off" etc.).

Before working with a comprehensive financial planner, a client should establish that the planner is competent and worthy of trust, and will act in the client's interests rather than being primarily interested in selling the client financial products for his own benefit. As the relationship unfolds, an individual financial planning client's objective in working with a comprehensive financial planner is to clearly understand what needs to be done to implement the financial plan created for them. So, in many ways, a financial planner's step-by-step written implementation plan of action items, created after the plan is completed, has more value to many clients than the plan itself. The comprehensive written lifetime financial plan is a technical document utilized by the financial planner, the written implementation plan of action is just a few pages of action items required to implement the plan; a much more "usable" document to the client.


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