The REAL financial planner thing is really hard.
Trust but verify.
Measure competence somehow.
Ask people you trust for a reference.

In terms of a list of members of the Secret Society of REAL financial planners, I have a list, It has the 3-4 planners that I would want my wife to call if I was no longer around.

Planners that I can personal say I would trust my families money with. A few in Tucson, one in Atlanta, one in North Carolina, one in Las Vegas. I am sure there are others but those are the folks I had in my mind when I started this Secret Society.

In fact if you are looking for a REAL planner, and live in one of those cities, email me and I can connect you.

I know that there are more members, In fact I have been exchanging emails with a number of them. I just don't know then well enough, so they are secret. My goal, and my plea is that we find all the members of the secret society and expose them! Tell the world the difference they are making…

How is the only question…maybe by selling t-shirts…

I view the promotion of Passive Investing (the idea that you don't need to change your stock allocation in response to big price changes) as financial porn. But I have seen advocates of Passive Investing argue that those who point out the flaws of Passive Investing are putting forward financial porn.

Once we adopt an investing strategy, we want it to work. We become emotionally invested in it. From that point forward, we filter every information bit we come across so that we hear it as confirming our biases.

I believe that we don't need to change the information we hear so much as we need to change our attitude toward the information. We need to strive to become more humble. We need to acknowledge that we don't know it all today and that we never will. We need to train ourselves to seek put opposing views that challenge our biases.

When I say “we,” I don't mean just middle-class investors. I also mean those we refer to as “experts.” They don't know as much as they like to think they know either (in my assessment). And they are even more reluctant than the ordinary investors to admit getting it wrong. I think a good case can be made that in general it is the “experts” who are the most off the right track in their understanding of how stock investing works. What a mess!

Rob

On finding a REAL financial planner, I think it goes beyond trust. A REAL financial planner is not only trustworthy, but actually does planning too. To further complicate things advisers, trustworthy ones, have varying ideas about what real financial planning actually is.

One clarification on the sketch: I do not mean that using “information” from
“some blog, article, or book” as a factor in your decision making process is
a disaster. I meant using a single blog post, article, or book, to invest
your life saving often is a disaster.

When I drew it I was
thinking about the disaster of trying to make a decision based on
those two Wall Street Journal articles about bonds.
There is so much conflicting information from so many sources that I
don't know how people sort through it all.

I think that is one of the reasons
GetRichSlowly is so good is that JD does a good job of filtering much
of that noise.

Like you pointed out LOTS of people have saved themselves a lot in terms of
cost and headache using some of the “Boglehead” information.

I think that it has also been pointed out that it is also just as difficult
(maybe even more) to find a financial professional you can actually trust.
[see Mike's sketch for that one]

@Holly, I wish I had an answer for you on how to find a REAL planner. I have
found that there is not a qualification that guarantees that you have
someone you can trust, so the way we have handled that in the past, is email
me a bit about yourself and where you are located and we will do our best to
direct you. If we don't know a member of the Secret Society in your area, I
can give you some general direction. Not perfect, but for now it is the best
we've got.

Hope this helps clarify some issues. Thanks for the discussion. Keep it
coming.

I hope the point was clear in the post…

In case it is not, the point is really is that taking “rules of thumb” or
general advice from any source (including behaviorgap.com) can only take you
so far. At some point the real work is figuring out how that information
applies to your situation. For some people that will involve hiring a REAL
financial planner, and as Mark has pointed out, that is a challenge in
itself.

I know REAL planners that recommend overweighting REITs with a separate allocation, while others recommend just going with the REIT exposure in the total stock market. And the whole FF small/value bias and DFA question, look out! Treasuries vs. aggregate bond market. How big the emergency fund should be. How many years worth of cash reserves to keep in retirement. The list goes on and on.

These are issues where I think a little extra knowledge and perhaps even some advice from PF blogs or articles can make people become better consumers of financial planning advice.