As their name suggests, their main shtick is to help plan out your finances. Technically, anyone can call themselves a financial planner, which can make this industry hard to navigate. “Once you get into financial services, there are about a million different abbreviations, acronyms, and titles that can come up,” says Kerrie Carden, founder of Equip Advisory and the financial planner I decided to work with. “You might come across someone who is officially an RIA, which is a registered investment advisor. That person is categorically different from a financial planner.” For example, RIAs will help their clients more with investing than planning. But people can really call themselves anything, from financial advisors to coaches to wealth managers, even if they may not have received any kind of certification. Carden, like many other financial professionals out there, is a CFP (aka a certified financial planner), meaning that she obtained a certification through the Center for Financial Planning — so that’s something to look out for when searching for a planner of your own.
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