The Right Way to Hire Financial Help: A Complete Guide to Choosing and Managing Brokers, Financial Planners, Insurance Agents, Lawyers, Tax Preparers, Bankers, and Real Estate Agents

"The Right Way to Hire Financial Help goes where no other personal finance book has gone before. Chuck Jaffe offers solid, no-nonsense advice that can help people save--and even make--a bundle. -- Gerri Detweiler, financial author and former director of the National Council of Individual Investors

Hiring financial help is a task that many otherwise savvy people approach the wrong way, opting to go on recommendations from family and friends, chance encounters, or advertisements rather than on sound research. In witty, highly readable prose, nationally syndicated columnist Charles A. Jaffe takes the reader through the basics of how to locate appropriate candidates, understand their credentials, check references, conduct initial interviews, maintain control of the relationships and ones finances, and fire an advisor who is not working out.

The book contains guidance on hiring and checking the backgrounds of seven types of advisors--brokers, financial planners, insurance agents, lawyers, tax preparers, bankers, and real estate agents--as well as specific questions to ask to determine whether an advisor is a good, qualified match. In addition the book offers guidance on how to help the advisors function as a team. The author's aim is to help the reader assemble and manage a pool of advisors to serve every major need for the rest of a financial lifetime.

More information is available at our book-of-the-month site.

Charles A. Jaffe is a personal finance columnist at the Boston Globe.