Here is a list of some of the best personal finance articles from my favorite personal finance websites. To kick start your week, spend some time digging through the Millionaire Money Habits archives and the links below to improve your financial literacy and increase your net worth.

Investing:

• 3 Effective Option Strategies to Soften The Blow in This Volatile Market at Generation X Finance
• Know Your Investing & Market History at Blueprint for Financial Prosperity
• Investment Strategy, Chasing Performance, or Market Timing? Help! at Mollanomy
• Dollars

Spending and Saving:

• Becoming a Saver when You Like to Spend at Gather Little by Little
• When Buying on Sale Isn’t Frugal at beingfrugal.net
• 10 Free Tools to Help You Get a Handle on Your Personal Finances at The Digerati Life
• Real Simple: Save More, Worry Less at Get Rich Slowly
• 15 Money Moves for Tough Times at Free Money Finance

Your Money:

• My Sources Of Alternative Income And How I Make Them Work For Me at My Two
• How to Detect and Avoid IRS Tax Scams and Identity Theft at Cash Money Life
• Early Retirement: Figuring Out How Much You’ll Need at fivecentnickel.com
• Little Income, Big Debts: Managing Your Money in Your College Years at The Simple Dollar

Millionaire Money Habit: To build wealth, you need to perpetually improve your financial literacy. Digest as much information as possible and stick to a plan that works for you. In addition to the articles above, pick up one the recommended books found at the footer of this website, and be sure to subscribe to the RSS feed or by email to be notified of new articles.

So you’ve Interviewed Financial Advisers and you thought you found a winner, but after some a few months you are starting to become suspicious of your financial planner’s ability or intentions. Don’t be afraid to fire your financial planer, especially if he or she is engaging in any of the following activities:

Lack of Communication: Financial advisers should be in touch with you in good times and bad. If you are trying to reach your planner to discuss your portfolio during these rocky times in the stock market, and you can’t get a call back, that is not a good sign. Chances are he or she does not have an answer for you or is not confident in how to protect you from the downside.

Churn: If your financial planner is recommending excessive trading and moving you in and out of stocks or mutual funds, get rid of him or her. Chances are they are working with their commission check in mind, not your portfolio performance.

Unusual Offers: If your adviser is pushing stocks or funds with very low trading volume, low float (or a small number of shares on the market), or stocks that are extremely cheap, it’s a good time to start asking questions. Chances are they have the brokerage firm’s interest in mind, not yours. According to Investopedia.com:

Brokerage firms sometimes hold positions in certain stocks or bonds that may not be of the highest quality. They know that they can’t dump them on the open market, or the selling pressure will collapse the security’s price. Instead, they often offer incentives, such as higher payouts, to their brokers to push these stocks or bonds to their clients over time.

Poor Performance: While your investments need to be looked at a long-term perspective, the performance of your financial planner should be in-line with the performance of the overall market. While from time to time your portfolio may under perform when compared to the S&P 500 or the Dow Jones Industrial Average, this should not be consistent and your adviser should have a sound explanation.

Dishonesty: If you find out your financial adviser lied or stretched the truth, do not work with them. While something as major as lying about their credentials or how they are paid should be reported, minor inconsistencies should also arouse suspicion. They should also be able to take responsibility for their performance. You can’t win all of the time, but you should have the ability to admit a mistake when one is made.

Incomplete Analysis: Most financial planners are specialized in certain areas and have strengths in particular investments. Be wary of those who are only looking at that specific area of your portfolio rather than the whole. This can increase your risks as diversification is minimized.

To do a quick background check on your financial planner, visit www.brokercheck.finra.org to see if any disciplinary actions or complaints have been filed. Be sure to also verify they are actually a certified financial planner by visiting www.cfpboard.org/search.

Millionaire Money Habit: Your money is your early retirement. Don’t be afraid to have high expectations of your financial adviser and fire them when things are not going the way you planned. There are plenty of fantastic advisers who will do a better job managing your finances and investments. -RT

In Paying for Financial Advice we discussed how it is important to find out how your financial advisor is paid in order to understand exactly what their best interests are. While asking how they are paid is an important question to ask, it is not the only one. So how do you find a good financial adviser?

There are a couple of recommendations that are frequently offered, which I do not agree with:

• Ask a Friend for a Referral: Ask yourself, do your friends really know the difference between a good financial adviser and a bad one? They may have recently had a good year as a result of their advisor’s recent stock picks, but this does not measure long-term performance.
• Ask Financial Advisers How Well They Do: It is often recommended to ask for a firm’s “top advisers,” or to ask a financial planner how well he or she did for himself/herself in the past few years. The problem here is that if they are on a commission based schedule, their high performance does not necessarily mean their clients’ portfolio performed well. They could have just been very successful at selling funds that paid a high commission and convinced clients to trade frequently. Both of these have been shown to actually return poorer results than just a plain vanilla index fund that tracks the S&P 500.

So What is the Best Way to Find a Great Financial Planner?

In the personal finance world, experience is valuable. A financial planner who has years of experience and can back it up with results will cost you more money. That, in my opinion, is the cost for insurance and making more money in a good market and losing less in a bad. You can find out their track record by simply asking, but you should also do a background check with the SEC to see if he or she has any complaints on record.

While interviewing your potential financial planners, find out what their strategy is and what they personally own. This will tell you if you have the same goals and share the same philosophy. Find out how much risk they take with their clients’ portfolio. Also ask them what products they believe the most in and which one’s they would like to learn more about. This will tell you if they are honest and also give you some insight on what products they will be recommending.

The relationship you have with your financial planner is also important. If you don’t communicate well together and do not share an open, honest relationship, your money is at jeopardy. Make sure he or she is clearly able to communicate objectives, strategies and products. If you don’t understand then you shouldn’t be investing with them.

Spend enough time interviewing the financial advisers to be able to sufficiently tell if there is a personality clash. Find out how long his or her clients have been with them and ask for references. Don’t be afraid to call the references and ask how often they meet with their financial planner to review their portfolio.

What are some questions you ask when interviewing financial advisers?

Millionaire Money Habit: When shopping for a financial planner, do your due diligence. Your money and your retirement is at stake, and the process of finding a highly-qualified, highly-capable financial adviser should not be taken lightly. -RT

Be sure to subscribe to the RSS feed or by email to be notified about upcoming article in the series, When to Fire Your Financial Adviser.