A Financial Advisor is a person who helps people invest their money for long and short term goals. One of the main duties of a Financial Advisor is to determine the clients’ goals and risk tolerance and then recommend appropriate investments.

Goal Setting: While most of us have a broad idea of what we want to spend our money on (a new house, a new car, college education for the kids etc.), many of us may not actually get down to hard numbers and calculate how much “college education for the kids” actually comes down to. Here is where a good Financial Advisor comes in. He is your “human calculator”, the one who actually does the calculations and tells you in hard figures how much of your money you have to keep aside for various activities.

Planning: Financial planning is something we all need to do at some point or the other, whether we like it or not. It can be something simple or something complex. While most of us may be able to deal with simple financial planning, a Financial Advisor would help with the complex part. This is simply because, as a qualified person, he would possess the knowledge and experience to understand our financial goals and draft them into a proper financial plan.

Professional Help: Lets face it – it isn’t easy for us to understand investment, tax-saving and the numerous other schemes being thrown into our face thanks to advertising. It’s pretty complex, and here is where the financial advisor can help us. By explaining and analyzing the numerous schemes available to us, he can help us make better, more informed choices.

Personal Attention: Everyone has unique financial needs and goals, and hence, everyone needs a financial advisor of their own, who can actually take time to study and decipher the different schemes that would suit one’s investment plans the best.

Choosing a financial advisor is a laborious process. It is important for us to have some knowledge of how things work financially, as that will help us decide. Equally important is to ‘shop around’ – check with professionals close to us like a lawyer or a bank manager, business associates, or even other family members. Interviewing potential candidates face to face, gauging their potential would be a good idea – after all you will reap the benefits of your hard work at the initial stages forever.

Dan Goldie is the President and Founder of Dan Goldie Financial Services. For nearly two decades he has devoted his professional career to helping individual investors and their families realize their investment and financial goals. He has been recognized by the San Francisco Business Times as one of the top 25 Bay Area independent advisors, and by Barron’s Magazine as one of the top 100 independent financial advisors and 1000 financial advisors in the United States.

At Dan Goldie Financial Services, they are an independent financial advisor, financial planner, and wealth manager. They can help you simplify your financial life, optimize your investments, and organize your personal financial planning. They work closely with you to help grow and protect your wealth and achieve your most important financial goals. They help their clients make smart financial and investment decisions, and gain confidence with a secure financial future.

To become a financial planner, you first must know what their job profile is. Financial planners help in determining the financial resources required to meet the company’s operating program. They also help in forecasting the extent to which these requirements will be met by the internal generation of funds, and the extent to which they will be met from external sources. It’s the job of financial planners to develop the best plans to obtain the required external funds. They also help in establishing and maintaining a system of financial control governing the allocation and use of funds. Financial planners formulate programs to provide the most effective cost-volume-profit relationship. It’s the job of financial planners to analyze the financial results of operations, report the facts to the top management and make recommendations on future operations of the firm.

To do all these functions efficiently, financial planners first need to establish the financial objectives of the enterprise. Both long-term and short-term objectives should be established for the effective utilization of the financial resources. Then comes the next step of formulating policies. Policies are broad guidelines. Financial policies relate to procurement, administration and distribution of business funds. The next step financial planners have to do is to formulate procedures. Procedures are the specific order of doing things. They are formed for ensuring consistency of actions. In financial procedures, the financial executives decide about the control system, develop standards of performance and evaluate the performance. Lastly, they have to forecast the future. In order to take proper action to achieve the objectives established, it is necessary to know the future positions. This is facilitated by forecasting the future.