Why Your Financial Advisor Can’t Help You Achieve Financial Freedom

This post may contain affiliate links. Please check out my disclosure for more information.

Welcome to the 5th Installment of my:

Achieve TRUE Financial Freedom Series

Welcome to my Financial Freedom series. By now, you have read, What Financial Freedom is NOT, followed by Financial Freedom & Your Time, and then Financial Freedom & Your Money and then Financial Freedom & Opportunity.

Yes, unfortunately, today’s lesson is probably going to burst your bubble a little bit.

Financial advisors are trained by insurance companies, banks, and other businesses, to sell products. Insurance companies, like every other company, are most interested in their bottom line, not so much your Financial Freedom.

Don’t believe me? That’s okay. I enjoy a little healthy skepticism.

Take a moment and think about everyone you know that has successfully achieved Financial Freedom, not Financial Independence or Early Retirement, as we defined them in What Financial Freedom is Not. Now, can you truly say that all these people were not entrepreneurs or businesspersons, did not have a high paying job or career, and did not come into a windfall of sorts in their life? Did any of these people attain this status simply by purchasing a financial product, or did they use wealth, derived by other means, to buy a financial product and then wait and live off this product?

What Your Financial Advisor Probably Won’t Talk About

Your Financial Advisor, even if in possession of a CFP qualification, will most likely not be able to give you much advice about:

• Achieving Financial Freedom
• Budgeting
• Business Advice
• Career Advice
• Credit Score Management
• Debt Management
• Entrepreneurship
• How to Create Multiple Streams of Income
• Loan and Debt Management
• Property Investment

All of these topics, and others, definitely play a massive role in your overall Financial Plan, much more so if Financial Freedom is your pursuit.

Your Financial Advisor cannot sell you a product for any of these, so chances are, they are not a trained professional on any of these topics and thus will not mention these subjects during your consultations.

What Your Financial Advisor Will Probably Talk to You About

Your Financial Advisor will much more likely be well versed in financial topics that they can translate into a sale. They will much more likely tell you why you need to get insurance, purchase an investment or retirement product that they sell, and draft a will once you have purchased some of their products.

Don’t get me wrong, there is, without a doubt, a good place for a Financial Advisor in your financial planning. Furthermore, if you have not invested your time in increasing your financial literacy your Financial Advisor may be your best bet at having a somewhat decent retirement.

If, however, you want to have a great retirement, or better yet, attain Financial Freedom at a decent age, your Financial Advisor will not be able to get you there, unless you give them a lot of your money, in which case you probably wouldn’t need them much anyway.

How You Can Achieve Financial Freedom

The philosophy from which Financial Advisors are trained and practice is this:

“You can SAVE your way to wealth or riches”

I read A LOT about money and wealth, and I have yet to come across individuals who have achieved success on this front without mastering money. As we learned in Financial Freedom and Money: money becomes useful when it is spent.

If saving (through bank or investment product) is your only financial planning strategy, then money is your master, you do not master money. Saving money is an inevitable part of financial success, but it is a part, not the whole.

Your Financial Advisor won’t tell you this because it won’t make them money, and possibly, worse still, they don’t know this themselves, a big reason they haven’t attained Financial Freedom in their own right. Thus they will try to convince you that you can save your way to wealth or Financial Freedom. Statistically speaking, I sincerely beg to differ.

What Am I Saying?

Get yourself a good Financial Advisor. There are Policy Salespersons, and there are Financial Advisors. Their business cards say the same thing. It’s up to you to tell them apart, so shop around. Even when you have found a good one, let them advise you as best they can on what they know, but don’t expect them to have the answers to all matters relating to your finances.

Luckily, you are living in the information age where information can be transmitted across the world within a matter of seconds. Use this to your advantage. Hone your financial literacy. Take control of your destiny.

Catch the next installment of my Achieve TRUE Financial Freedom Series, The Importance of Credit on Your Path to Financial Freedom.