In the absence of any national or state financial competency exams, the Denver-based Certified Financial Planner Board of Standards acts as a surrogate professional licensing group. The course work takes about two years of part-time study. To keep the designation, CFPs have to follow a code of ethics and complete 30 hours of continuing education every two years. As more people become attracted to financial planning as a career, consumers need to become more selective about whom they allow to manage their money. Because basically anyone can call himself a financial planner, this is a field that is ripe for exploitation.
Consumers have to be cautious.
Don't pay a penny to a planner until you've talked about the planner's certification status, fees and commissions, philosophies about money and its uses and general strategy for generating and preserving income. You want to know if this person is committed to the profession, how he or she plans to make money by helping you and if the planner is a risk-taker or a fiscal conservative. You also can find out if the adviser has had any problems with other investors or federal and state regulators. Because it will be chic to be a financial planner for a least a year, we all need to take steps to protect ourselves. Unlike the wave of college graduates and career changers who flooded into Web site management last year, a similar push into financial planning could sink investors' financial futures.