I present to you four warning signs of financial advisor competence: (1) They display huge effort in marketing their services; (2) They have a huge marketing budget; (3) They rarely, if ever, listen to their clients; and, (4) They fail to demonstrate that they have exhausted all efforts to improve their skills, become obsolete, or develop new products, leaving their clients with the false impression that they have sufficient financial planning skills.

Even if you are not actively looking for ways to improve your personal finance planning skills, one example of endorsing expensive personal planning services is to buy advising. Then it becomes obligatory for you to hire additional resources, such as increasing your own level of financial knowledge and developing new products, to enhance your planning skills.

Often, people look at their personal finances from a total money making perspective. When they get mad because they can’t borrow more money, they want to get a more expensive counseling service to solve their problem. That is their natural reaction. But this is not a realistic way to look at money including, wealth management, planning, budgeting, and investing. You cannot work on one area of your financial life. All the financial expertise in the world will not get you out of a hole, in addition to winning an additional few heartbeats, you have to learn how to save money and increase your net worth.

The majority of financial advisors undermine their clients’ financial planning instead of enhancing it. They cover up their past mistakes by being vague, or maybe pretend they did not occur. They fail to demonstrate a clear understanding of investment properly to their clients, or fail to implement investment consistently emphasize quality of assets over quantity of them. They do not continuously follow up with their clients after establishing a relationship, and quite often get distracted from their objective. They check many things while trying to solve a particular problem.

It is quite hard to become a Certified Financial Planner (CFP), a specialized CFP code-V HM Certificate, without being a millionaire. Fewer than 30,000 individuals in the United States have acquired the CFP Expertise necessary to become a CFP, and less than 1% of CFP’s have attained the CFP status traditionally regarded as the lowest. Yet, CFP’s typically waste their months trying to become the ‘lovely’ certified financial consultant.

To be a certified financial consultant and to have qualifications to boast, many individuals must take an enormous amount of tests and go through a rigorous training program. This is too hard especially when they know they lack quality in their financial planning. College graduates earning well on average eight times the salary of those working in the financial profession are not prepared to be trusted to advice their clients money. They are often perceived by clients as too ‘stupid’ to come up with good personalized advice for their clients, as they have too many ‘know it all’ in their heads. Instead they mindlessly repeat what every advisor says and blindly follow the advice of each of their clients, often getting them into more and more debt.

Furthermore, their clients trust them hoping this will solve their financial problems. In reality, those highly paid financial planners are receiving their paycheck from the exact same type of client that they are trying to attract to them. And, if they cannot attract even this limited number of clients, they will inevitably cause their business to pretty much die.

Good financial advice from certified financial planners is necessary. However, they ought to be the ones providing the financial advice, not the ones giving it to you. It is difficult to come up with good financial advice and their qualification should not be the criteria. There are many individuals who have been ‘certified’ by the Financial Planning Association and the American College of Financial Planning and Financial statisticians, who hold prestigious awards from the associations, yet do not possess the financial planning skill-set to create financial security and secure life, despite dealing with receiving these awards and having contributed to the financial planning industry for years.

The ones I’m referring to here are: certified financial planners who failed on their CFP exam, claiming they did not even attempt to pass it. The truth is that they failed because they did not possess a specific financial planning skill-set and were only qualified to help their clients meet specific patterns of problem-solving. The reality is that their hope for success and subsequent compensation relies on creating the right image for their clients. They often do their very best to get their clients to ‘fun’ themselves through their services instead of helping them achieve their financial dreams.

Interestingly, I find it has been a common trend for financial advisors to fail their clients so they can earn a commission from undisclosed financial products and investments earnings, worse than that, they fail so they can faithfully make a ‘set recommend’ and repeat this success ratio over and over again.