Are there financial advisors who will help me with planning & Quicken consolidation ?

lee de cola

my wife & i have been using quicken (plus various spreadsheets) for decades but now want to consolidate our tools into a quicken-based system. are there experts who will help us 1) with the technical work and 2) provide fee-for-service financial advice?

Ray Cosner

There are lots of fee-for-service financial advisors. Separating the wheat from the chaff is hard. Before meeting with a candidate, think long and hard about your financial short- and long-range goals, and the degree of risk you are comfortable with. High returns ALWAYS come with high risk. There is no such thing as a genuine guarantee in the financial world. A reputable advisor will want to probe these issues with you at the start, and periodically after the relationship in established.

It's easy for someone to show a good record when the market is moving up steadily. The key is how good is their advice in a down market, or in a volatile market like we have today. Simply asking the candidate advisor to give you his/her numbers isn't going to give you the answer. They are not going to tell you anything that makes them look bad. They probably have many years of experience in spinning their record so they look good. I'd suggest getting advice from people you've known for a few years - do they use an advisor, has the advice been good. You can also look online and see if any of their clients have filed complaints with the Feds - but that is not a conclusive indicator of the advisor's value.

A big issue is: what is their balance between advice that benefits you, vs advice that benefits the advisor. My horror story: I worked with an advisor 30+ years ago. At the time I was in my 30s, working in a professional job with substantial upward potential. I thought my advisor was pretty good, so I introduced my retired, widowed mother to him. The advisor give my mother, living on a fixed income, exactly the same recommendations he had given me, even though my mother and I were in drastically different financial positions. I dropped him like a hot potato. Dig into how they get compensated.

After you choose an advisor, don't fall in love with him/her. Keep watching for signs that the advisor is not aligned with your goals and your financial position. In the first couple years, don't get into investments that you can't get out of easily or cheaply - in case you start to see warning signs about the advice you're getting.

lee de cola

thanks, Ray, for your thoughtful answer. we've plenty of experience with planners (and anyway are heavily into vanguard funds so we don't have much leeway), but i'm looking for someone who could take our decades of quicken data plus some portfolio data and help us 1) streamline the system and 2) advise on some simple cash flow issues. we're pretty conservative and good judges of when someone isn't working for and with us.

Greg_the_Geek

You might want to post the general area of the country that you're located.

Rocket J Squirrel

Greg_the_Geek said:

You might want to post the general area of the country that you're located.

Or a specific area. "California" won't help much.

This is a particularly fraught time to be seeking or giving investment advice. We're in a cyclical bear market which at least for now is inside a secular bull market. But the inversions in both the 3mo/10yr and 2yr/10yr yield curves suggest that bull market may be ending.

Note the weasel words "suggest" and "may". I use them on purpose because no one is really sure exactly where in the overall market and economic cycles we are right now. So those yield curve inversions may be less significant than usual. But a scenario in which short-term rates are higher than long-term rates bodes ill for financial markets, i.e., credit, lending, and bank profits.

So hold onto your hats and choose your advisors wisely.

Rocket J Squirrel

lee de cola said:

i'm looking for someone who could take our decades of quicken data plus some portfolio data and help us 1) streamline the system and 2) advise on some simple cash flow issues.

To come back to the actual question asked , in all my decades of Quickening, I have never heard of a financial adviser who would accept and work with clients' Quicken data.

If such advisors did exist, I would expect to see them on this forum. Even responding to this specific thread. Yoo hoo?

Ps56k2

lee de cola said:... are heavily into Vanguard Funds so we don't have much leeway...

If you are heavy into Vanguard funds -
you might be interested in an online forum called - Bogleheads -
for a variety of financial discussions & financial topics related to investing.

https://www.bogleheads.org/forum/index.php

lee de cola

ok, we'd like to work with someone in the Washington DC area who's a Quicken expert AND does financial planning.