Investments & Savings are the most important decisions in one’s life for which we advise you to contact a financial planner and avail their services.
But, it is important for you, as a prudent investor, to know how capable your financial planner is. You must identify those planners who are not interested in your financial growth and are rather interested in selling their company’s products. Here are certain indicators that you need to be watchfull of:
How much can you invest?
If your planner becomes too curious about your investment corpus when you are still fairly new to the plan, he must just turn out to be just some other sales person, who is inquisitive to know your present investments and how they can be converted to new ones, enabling him to earn commissions.
But if the planner asks you about your earnings, feel free to disclose the net income that is generated by you or your family members as it is difficult to formulate a suitable financial plan without that information.
What products do you like?
It is a planner’s duty to find out what product s best going to suit the investor. It is obvous that most of us do not want to get into risky situations and might prefer investing in fixed income generating schemes. However a planner must make the investor understand that, for example, if the investor invests about 27% of his gross income in fixed return products through provident fund and superannuation, another debt product does not make much sense. Equity products should be considered in such cases, bearing the age of the investor in mind.
Pushing products
If your planner is in a hurry to get you invested in a particular product and does not show any interest in overall planning, he may finally turn out to be just a relationship manager. Such people are taught to sell and maximize the revenue for the time spent with the clients. If they start talking about the benefits of specific categories. He may pull out charts and other data to convince you but behind all the papers may be huge commissions he is thinking of, so as a prudent investor be careful.
What to do
“Someone may have had a bad experience of investing in, say, mutual funds and so he would not be comfortable investing in them again. A planner then needs to justify his decision and educate the client about the product category”, says Laovaii Navlakhi, MD and chief financial planner, International Money Matters, a financial planning and investment advisory firm.
Try t reason your planner about various decisions that needs to be taken. A part from his/her assurances, it is very important to see whether you will be comfortable with that decision.
If you are into debts as in a home loan, car loan etc., see if you can repay the loan amount by liquidating your assets so that your financial burden can be reduced.