Financial adviser

Anyone can tell you how they would run your finances – especially after a few drinks.

If they advise you in a professional capacity however they must be licensed under the Financial Services Reform Act 2001 and other Federal (and sometimes State) legislation.

Licensing is intended to ensure that advisers are honest, that they have some training and that they offer a formal complaints procedure.

It doesn't guarantee they are any good at what they claim to do and it certainly doesn't mean they have to pursue your best interests.

Despite this, you do need a financial adviser when it comes to retirement, if only because the legal and taxation framework and the investment parameters are complex and changing: no-one can spend the time to understand and keep up, if it's not their profession.

Suppose you had decided not to use Black Swan Event Financial Planning, but you asked us what to look for in an adviser, what would we say?

Go for experience. Decades, long enough to have been there for all the ups and downs of a full economic cycle – not a couple of years of one market or another.
Choose a stayer: someone whose career is financial planning, not someone burning their way through to the next corporate step up.
Look to build a relationship where your adviser learns who you are and what you want, so they see a picture beyond a commission.
Go for a deep understanding of markets. Academic qualifications are not always valued in business, but the fact is you need your adviser to understand a bit about how economies work over the cycle.
Go for track record. Hard to really assess, we know, but some good indicators are the proportion of clients who have been with them more than 10 years (for more than half of all advisers the answer would be zero) and the average time their clients have been with them (for some, it's one meeting, the one they made a sale at).

Or, if you would like to consider Black Swan, contact us for a no-obligation initial consultation,.

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