What Good Financial Advice Looks Like

Liz Weston, CFP®
By Liz Weston, CFP® 
Published
Edited by Hanah Cho
Liz Weston: What good financial advice looks like

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Good financial advice can help you achieve your life goals. Bad financial advice can cost you a fortune and leave you worse off than if you had tried to go it alone.

Unfortunately, you’re still on your own in trying to determine the good advice from the bad. A court decision overturned a U.S. Labor Department fiduciary rule that would have required financial advisors to put their retirement-account clients’ interests first. Prospects for a fiduciary rule proposed by the SEC are uncertain.

“The safe thing is for the investor to assume it’s still the same buyer-beware market that’s always existed,” says Barbara Roper, director of investor protection for Consumer Federation of America, a nonprofit advocacy group.

» Looking for professional advice? How to choose a financial advisor

Many Americans believe, incorrectly, that their financial advisors already are required to act in their clients’ best interests. In reality, most are held to lower standards. Asking advisors to disclose their conflicts of interest is always a good idea, but here are some other ways to spot advice that truly puts clients first:

Good advice doesn't promise the moon and stars. Beware of advisors who only want to talk about their investing prowess and how they plan to beat the market. Few advisors can consistently deliver market-beating returns, and attempts to do so usually drive up their clients’ costs. A better approach for most people is to invest all or most of their portfolios in low-cost index mutual funds or index exchange-traded funds that strive to match various market benchmarks.

Good advice doesn't promote "high-commission garbage." That’s what financial journalist Bob Veres, publisher of Inside Information, a service for advisors, calls products that are notorious for high costs and potential to enrich advisors at the expense of their clients. These can include non-traded real estate investment trusts, indexed annuities and variable annuities inside retirement accounts.

Proprietary mutual funds also can be problematic. These are the house-brand funds offered by the bank, brokerage or investment company where you have your account. Your advisor may earn extra compensation for pushing them, and they can have higher costs or worse performance than competing funds. Advisors may be able to make an argument why any of these products make sense for you, but it’s worth getting a second opinion from someone who doesn’t make commissions selling them.

“The more complex, opaque and illiquid the investment, the more generous the compensation to the advisor tends to be,” Roper says. “The incentives line up in a way that is directly contrary to the investor’s best interest.”

Good advice doesn't pretend to be free or cheaper than it is. All investments have costs, and advisors can be paid in a variety of ways that may not be readily apparent to their customers. Financial advisors should be straightforward in explaining those costs and the ways they’re compensated.

Also, investors who pay a percentage of their portfolios for advice should know how that fee is calculated. A fee that’s “only” 0.35% each quarter seems dirt cheap, but that adds up to 1.4% a year, which isn’t. Veres’ survey of about 1,000 advisors found most charge annual advisory fees of around 1% for portfolios worth less than $1 million.

Good advice doesn't deliberately confuse people. Some advisors make a big deal about being fee-based, but that means they also accept commissions or other incentives. Fee-only financial advisors, by contrast, are compensated solely by fees their clients pay. Also, some advisors have been telling their clients that the fiduciary rule required them to start charging fees. That’s not true, Roper says.

Good advice comes from an advisor who puts clients first. Only a few categories of advisors are required to be fiduciaries, or someone obligated to put their clients’ interests ahead of their own. Those advisors include registered investment advisors and certified financial planners when they’re offering financial planning advice. Certified public accountants have a professional code of conduct similar to a fiduciary standard.

When advisors don’t have a RIA, CFP or CPA after their names, ask if they’re willing to be fiduciaries and to put that promise in writing. The Committee for the Fiduciary Standard, a volunteer group promoting the standard, has an oath advisors can download and sign.

This article was written by NerdWallet and was originally published by The Associated Press.

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