Financial planner fell off the deep end

[RosieTR]

I'm not sure what to do about this situation. DH and I saw a financial planner, because I thought it might be a good idea to have someone to bounce ideas off of, and just have another set of eyes look at our overall picture and help us do some long-term planning. We picked a fee-only guy, and went to a first meeting. Seemed fine. Made another meeting for maybe 3 or 4 weeks later (it's a bit of a pain b/c of my commute, and worked with his schedule). That meeting went fine. He seemed to want to make another meeting in a short amount of time, like a week, which wouldn't work for us but then we said we'd work something out over email. We sent some documents, and then he kind of dropped off the face of the earth. I emailed after a few weeks to check in about making another appointment, and he said something about having to travel for a funeral and that he'd set something up when he got back. That's fine, I wasn't in too much of a hurry. But now it's been quite some time, like a couple of months. I get some sort of automated/semi-automated financial article emails from him which, frankly, are simple stuff I could get on any of a number of money and finance blogs. Most of it is stuff like "why stock picking is for fools" or whatever. So, I mostly ignore these, maybe take a gander if the title seems at all interesting. Other than that, I haven't gotten anything at all from him. I feel like I'd like to look elsewhere but also that we probably owe him for his time thus far. However, I have no idea how to go about breaking this off. The original agreement was for a certain fee in exchange for a plan, which would take maybe another 2 appointments. He sometimes charges clients by the hour so could potentially rate it that way, but then again I don't feel like I got much out of it either. If I do break it off, I'd want the records back rather than have them floating around out there, but don't know if he has some responsibility to keep them for some amount of time or what. Anyway, I'm just wondering if anyone has advice for this sort of situation.

[redfox]

I'd email him to tell him that you're coming to his office to hand him a check. Make it for the next day. Once you're there, get your records, then pay him.

I hope it works. Weird.

[bUU]

I took some comments made online at face value - that it was possible to get some value out of a financial planner if you picked them a certain way, made clear in advance your expectations, and made especially clear that they won't be getting any other business from you, other than renewals of the original arrangement (i.e., that you wouldn't take them up on any offers to manage your investments, get you into special investments opportunities, etc.) I still think that idea is bull. My own experience matches that of many others I've heard about: I followed all that advice to the letter and the financial planner we went with, while still providing the elements of a plan (so not as bad as yours) still isn't adding much value given how often he tacitly goes off on the "give me more business" tangent. It seems that - short of helping people get out of debt - they don't seem to be able to accomplish much for folks just looking for planning assistance.