Sunday, July 1, 2012

Making You Rich Is Not A Financial Planner's Responsibility


What are the responsibilities of a financial planner? There are many kinds of financial planners marketing their services to the market. Some are single-product planners: insurance agent, unit trust agent. Some are multiple-products planners – they deal with insurance, will writing, unit trust etc. Some are fee-based consultants – they are independent and charge consultancy fees only. The latter kind of planner are rare in Malaysia. In fact, I still don’t know any whom only charge fees and doesn’t deal with any financial product.
No matter what kind of planners they are, their role or responsibility to the clients might be similar to the list here:
  • provide proper advice on related financial matters
  • provide product information
  • recommend suitable product based on the client’s need
  • engage clients with the suitable product supplier ( insurance company, unit trust company, will writing company etc)
  • provide after sales services
  • help client to save
  • help client to invest for medium to long term
  • help clients to protect their wealth
Their roles is to help on managing the client’s financial resources, which is $$money$$. As stated above, the list does not include “help the client to become rich”. This is certainly out of the job scope. If meeting a financial planner and getting proper advice will make you rich, you will certainly feel that the consultant fees are too cheap to be true. In other words, don’t expect the financial planner can help you get rich. But if you meet the right one, he might be able to show you how others get rich.
If you still haven’t got what I am saying, this is the conclusion: – getting rich (if and only if we really want to get rich), is our own responsibility. It is not a burden or role of the financial planner.

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