What types of questions should we ask a financial advisor?

Before hiring an advisor, interview several.

Ask for specifics about the types of services and solutions they will offer you once you hire them. You'll know you're in the presence of an exceptional financial advisor if you get that overwhelming sense that they are going to be your "World's Greatest Problem Solver"

Here are some of the specific things we do for our Motorola clients, feel free to use this as a checklist during your interviews with finacial advisors:

• A comprehensive written lifetime financial plan updated annually with the objective of making work optional.
• A plan to determine, whenever you leave Motorola, whether you have enough to retire on or not.
• A plan in place to answer the question: “Should I accept the retirement offer and what I want to do next with the next chapter of my life.
• An analysis of your Motorola 401k to ensure that the investment choices are well-aligned with your needs.
• A well-coordinated stock options strategy orchestrating the three biggest issues:
  Timing, the expiration date of the options (or date when you’ll need money)
  Motorola stock price, a strategy to optimize the price you’ll get for each option
  Taxes, a strategy to reduce and manage (pay for) the tax consequences.
• A specific plan to address where your income will come from whenever you decide to leave Motorola.
• Mechanics of the smartest ways of moving money out of Motorola’s control safely into yours with no tax consequences.
• Specific coaching on every financial decision so you feel you are making smart decisions about your money in all areas like, managing health insurance decisions, helping negotiate major purchases like cars and homes.
• How to increase your overall happiness and measure it over time, to discover specific things that need to happen to stay “centered” on the things most important to you in life.
• Written plan to spend more time doing the things you love
• How to manage your cash so there’s adequate reserves and it’s working hard enough for you.
• The best way to reduce, and ultimately eliminate, debt on a schedule that makes sense to you
• We’ll tell you exact right kinds and amounts of every kind of insurance that exists, or whether you need it at all.
• A written disaster plan to envision what would happen to the business if something were to happen to you.
• Written strategies for every threat, obstacle or danger to the accomplishment of your goals.