It's not always easy to take a dispassionate view of your own financial situation and decide on the proper mix of insurance, investments and the like. If you are looking for someone to make broad-based investment recommendations based on extensive knowledge of your financial situation, you may be in the market for a financial planner.

You can get names of planners in your area from the profession's major membership organizations:

The Financial Planning Association has a registry service you can use to get names of members in your area. Visit its Web site, where you can do an online search. The site also features consumer information related to financial planning.
For a directory of fee-only practitioners, contact the National Association of Personal Financial Advisors.

After you have the names, select at least three candidates. Visit the office of each and ask for a detailed statement of fees and services, a résumé and references. Your purpose is to compare them on the following points:

Experience: Your planner should have, at the very minimum, a few years of experience in planning or allied fields, such as accounting, securities analysis or trading, or law.

Credentials: Certified Financial Planner (CFP) is probably the best-known credential. Graduates must take a series of courses, pass a two-day, ten-part exam, and complete three years of work experience to earn the CFP designation. In addition, the planner must complete 30 hours of continuing education every two years to keep the credential. The coursework usually takes a couple of years or more to complete and covers virtually all aspects of financial planning for individuals.  At Madison, we have several experienced CFP's on our team.  

Access to experts: No one person, however well trained, has the encyclopedic knowledge required to deal in depth with all the problems that can affect an individual's financial affairs. Instead, a planner should be able to demonstrate that he or she consults regularly with experts in a variety of fields.

Fees and commissions: There is no standard fee system or scale in the planning business. Some planners work only for fees, much like lawyers. Madison is a fee-only firm.  Others operate entirely or almost entirely on commissions. In between are the larger number, who depend on a combination of fees and commissions.

In some cases the planner might partly credit commissions against the fee to encourage the client to buy insurance or other financial products through the planner's company. 

Madison is a fee-only firm, so we do not earn commissions on the sale of products like brokers do.  You won't find us suggesting that you purchase an investment or insurance product. There's nothing wrong with that, provided the product is suitable for someone in your financial situation and compares favorably with the scores of others you might buy elsewhere.

It's up to you to decide whether the quality of the planner's service is worth the cost.

By the editors of Kiplinger's Personal Finance (with editing by Madison Wealth Managment), Updated January 2015