Make the Most of Your First Meeting With a Financial Adviser Wall Street Journal article published Monday, November 5, 2012:
A really helpful article discussing what folks may expect at a first
> meeting with a financial adviser.
>
> Unfortunately, the article doesn't shed very much light on some
> essential issues - the differences between a Registered Investment
> Adviser and a representative of a Broker/Dealer, for example.
>
> And while it mentions conflicts of interest in the context of folks who
> sell products and get commissions, it does gloss over the issue a bit.
> (For example, a fee-only planner/adviser who provides financial
> planning as part of an assets-under-management agreement still has a
> conflict of interest - it's in his interest to maximize the assets
> under his management. And an hourly planner has a conflict - it's in
> his interest to bill for more hours.) As someone once pointed out to
> me, any time money changes hands, there's a conflict of interest. The
> best you can do is make it exceedingly clear exactly when money is
> changing hand and what it's paying for - which may be the bigger
> problem with commission-based services.)
>
> Nevertheless, it's a great article and highly recommended.
> ---
> The above is from a blog post I wrote about this WSJ article. In my
> blog post, I go into more detail about how my shop does initial
> meetings, and if folks would like to read it, I'd be quite pleased, but
> I want to make clear that I'm posting this here to
> misc.invest.financial-plan mainly to let folks know about the article,
> not about my own business. The link below is to my blog post.
>
>
>