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What Services Does a Financial Consultant Provide?
A financial consultant is a professional who provides you with financial services based on your unique business situation. Financial consultants are also referred to as:
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Financial planners
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Financial advisors
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Wealth management advisors
These financial consultant experts will work closely with you to help you understand your assets and financial goals. This can range from making sound and appropriate retirement investments to investing portions of your savings for short-term gains.
However, financial consultants aren’t just limited to your personal finances. The financial consultant you hire online can also guide you and your business on a wide variety of financial areas, including:
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Estate planning
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Retirement planning
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Business consulting
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Business-related tax strategies, including EIN tax and income tax
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Insurance planning
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Asset protection planning
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Employee benefits planning
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Financial forecasting
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Portfolio management
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Debt management
Because these experts offer a wide range of services, it’s important to pause and think about your personal and business goals before hiring a financial consultant. Are you looking for financial consulting services to help you design your personal financial goals? Do you need someone who can process and understand large amounts of business data relating to taxes? Do you need financial advisors to help you navigate optimizing your tax return?
If it’s at all finance or business related, it’s time to hire a freelance financial consultant for their services.
Benefits of Hiring a Freelance Financial Consultant
While more and more individuals and business owners are interested in AI-driven financial management (such as Michael AI and AI Stock Investing Analyst), there’s truly no replacement for working with real experts. AI programs may be cost-effective, but they’re created by designers and developers using trends in data. However, AI doesn't have the talent that financial consulting experts may have.
Rather than opting for an AI program, we recommend going the freelance route for your financial forecasting, business management, and personal finance needs. When you hire freelance talent, you have a financial consultant who is dedicated to not only tracking the same data trends, but contextualizes them to your business goals and budget.
Other benefits of hiring freelance experts versus AI programs include:
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A financial consultant will help you understand your own current situation and get everything organized.
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If you don’t know where to start, a financial consultant can help you identify your goals and create a plan on a freelance basis. This means you don’t have to be locked-in to any plans or can change planners freely.
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Freelance talent will keep you on track with your goals and monitor your business progress.
How Much Does It Cost to Hire Financial Consultants?
It typically costs between $2,000 and $7,500 per year to hire a financial consultant online if they charge a flat fee. Some financial consultants charge a percentage of your account balance, typically between 0.25% to 1% per year, so that amount depends on the size of the online account balance.
What to Know Before You Hire Freelance Talent
For a financial consultant to be certified, they must hold the chartered financial consultant designation (ChFC). This certification requires them to take specific courses and pass a certification test, as well as participate in an annual recertification program to maintain their designation. The ChFC certification also requires advisors to have worked in the field of finance for a minimum of three years or have a formal higher education degree in business or finance.
This certification proves that your financial consultant adheres to a standardized code of ethics, holds formal expertise in a wide range of business, marketing, and personal financing, and has the talent and practical application of the skills learned in real-life scenarios.
Other accredited certifications include the certified financial planner certification (CFP) and the chartered financial analyst (CFA) designation.
There are ways to confirm the freelance talent you want to hire meets these criteria. Cross-check their certifications listed with the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority’s professional designations database. This will detail each certification’s requirements, accreditations, professional status, talent, and more.
When you’re looking to hire financial consultants, verify they have both certification and real working experience in the field of financial forecasting and management. Once you’ve found experts you like, it’s time to interview them for your business. Here are some key questions to ask before you hire a financial consultant:
“Are You a Fiduciary?”
Fiduciaries are experts who work in your best interests and will only recommend investments that fit your business needs. Non-fiduciaries, like broker-dealers, will only recommend products that are ‘suitable,’ even if they don’t match your business needs or aren’t the lowest cost.
“How Will Payment Work After Hire?”
Financial consultants typically offer a variety of fee structures, which can become complicated. When hiring freelance financial services, we recommend opting for ‘fee-only’ advisors. This means they don’t receive commissions for selling you products.
These experts will likely charge a percentage of the assets they manage for you, a flat fee for services, or an hourly fee for their services
“Who Is Your Custodian for Your Financial Consulting Practice?”
This question is often overlooked, but can provide you with security when you hire a financial consultant online through a freelance website. We recommend hiring experts who have hired an independent custodian to hold investments. Be wary of experts who act as their own custodian.
What is a custodian? A custodian is a specialized financial institution that holds your securities for safekeeping. This minimizes risk of misappropriation, misuse, theft, or any other unsavory legal concerns.
How to Hire a Freelance Financial Consultant on Guru
We recommend you hire freelance services through Guru. We design our freelance online platform to be easy for you and your business to use, and we offer a wide range of talent, so you can take your business and finances to the next level.
Simply use our ‘search’ function and input the criteria for the experts you want to hire. This includes any budget constraints, ratings preferences, and more. Once you’ve input the data for your ideal financial consultant, you will find a wide selection of freelance talent available for hire.
Each of these experts has a profile page with their portfolio of work, reviews, rates, and skillset. All you need to do next is reach out to connect, schedule interviews if needed, and hire. It’s never been easier to hire talent online, so get started with us today!