Personal Finance

Google is probably your best bet, honestly, but it's not as easy as I implied. https://www.napfa.org/ is a good place to start. I tried to find one willing to do a one-off consult when I retired. Figured "fee only" would have a business model like lawyers, but most of them seem to be built around annual contracts with fees based on assets (1+%), which generally means that their target market is people with at least seven figures liquid wealth. At least in my MCOL urban market. There may some good options, or courses, for normal humans associated with a local university or community college.

Astonishingly, to me, a lot of the financial planners I contacted were fully subscribed and not accepting new clients. There are a lot of people out there ready to spend $10,000+/year for the reassurance of a quarterly meeting with a CFP who's almost certainly not getting them $10k/year in tax savings or investment return. Definitely not improving tax savings by that much in the second year over the first year.

I mean, I'm a numbers guy, so I'm totally comfortable with exponential growth, uncertain returns, and tax models, even if I don't know all the legal loopholes. To me, the CFP is most useful for knowing those loopholes. I know enough people who are intimidated by calculating the tip at a restaurant to understand the value a financial planner subscription brings, but the fees for apparent effort absolutely blow my mind. Even famously low-fee Vanguard offers a personal advisor service, for 0.3% of assets, which is basically a human to plug your numbers into their robo-advisor.