What does a career adviser do?

At what point in your career should you consult a financial adviser?

• I am in my mid-30's.  I own a small starter home in the Bay Area.  I have a lot of stock options and RSU's from the startup that I work for, among other things.  Whom should I consult about the best way to build wealth and meet my financial goals?  How do I find a trustworthy and smart person?

• Answer:

  Sadly, there is no best way to build wealth and meet financial goals.  There are some basic principles that apply to everyone, but there are also personal variables that should be considered before setting up your financial plans.  Probably the most important part of any financial plan is to create wealth rather than debt.  This is so simple you don't need to consult any experts on this subject.  You just need to save money and not borrow money.  The more you save the more wealth you will have.  It is simple but not easy to do.  A simple approach like saving a certain amount or percentage of each paycheck will do nicely here.  At first you should probably store your savings in an insured bank savings account. As your savings grow you may want to find more rewarding ways to store you money that returns higher profits than the interest on a bank account.  You may not want to do this.  In today's interest environment your savings will not earn any noticeable amount of income in any sort of savings or debt instruments.  Interest rates are being forced to zero or near zero by the US Government.  This won't last forever, and the kind of returns you will get over a life time will probably average upward of 5 percent per year.  You can base your savings rate on this sort of returns and figure out your needs for retirement and other big needs like education funds for your children using this as your income model for your savings. If you are happy with a very low risk investment strategy such as this you might want to consult a "Certified Financial Planner" (cCFP) to help you plan your financial future.  You will be charged for this service, but the fee will not be huge.  However, if you want to take more risks with your savings a CFP can only give you relatively poor investment advice.  These professional advisers are good with arithmetic but uninspired with investment strategies.  They will certainly tell you the best way to invest in higher return instruments is through a strategy called "Dollar Cost Averaging" which is simply a poor strategy. Each time you increase your risks in choosing investment means you stand a chance of increasing your returns and therefore the amount of money you will have when your big spending needs arrive.  Even a small percentage increase will have a huge impact on your total wealth over a lifetime.  This is known as the power of compound interest. Probably the first step you should consider is investing in mutual funds.  These offer a higher potential return on your investment than bank savings accounts with perhaps little increase in risk of loss.  Mutual funds come in many different forms from stock index funds to managed stock funds to bond funds or mixtures of stocks and bonds known as "Total return" funds.  I recommend you read one of the many books available on this subject before moving some of your wealth out of the bank and into mutual funds.  I got my basic education on this subject from a book titled "Mutual funds for dummies".  It was easy to understand and offered excellent advice. At some point you might want to put some of your wealth into even higher risk investments with potentially higher returns.  The next step after mutual funds would be to invest in individual company stocks.  Again this is a step you should take with only some of your savings rather than all of your savings.  I am sure there are many books you can read on this subject as well.  I would suggest you use that method to learn your way around individual stock investing rather than any adviser.  In my experience ALL of the advisers available on this subject are more interested in their own gains than yours.  This is particularly true of "Full service" stock brokers.  They should be avoided at all times. I know I have just touched on the subject of wealth building and investing.  I hope it helps.  The important things to keep in mind are simply that saving your money is the only path to wealth and that the more risk you take the more money you CAN make but you can also lose.  Any "Get rich quick" scheme is more likely to get you poor than rich.