By Melanie Pinola How to Get a Personalized Financial Plan Without Spending a Fortune One of the best ways to get your financial affairs in order is to consult with a financial planner—someone who can answer questions about your specific goals and individual situation and guide you towards covering all your bases (from budgeting to saving enough for emergencies to consolidating student loans or planning properly for retirement). At $100 to $400 per hour to see a Certified Financial Planner, however, that's out of range of many people's budgets—or at least what most people are willing to spend. Money management site LearnVest offers an inexpensive alternative: unlimited email access for a year to a CFP for less than what you might pay for just one hour with an in-person visit. Here's how it works. In this article, I'll tell you all about my experience using LearnVest, the kinds of questions you can and should ask a CFP, and the kinds of advice you can expect to receive from LearnVest experts, so you can decide whether or not the service is right for you. LearnVest Tools and Services At first glance, LearnVest looks just like a Mint-like tool for automatically tracking your spending, but that's not LearnVest's biggest draw. Where Mint offers more robust tools you can use to analyze your spending, LearnVest is focused more on educating you on personal finance topics and providing advice to help you reach your goals (the site is targeted towards women, but don't let that dissuade you if you're male; the tools work just as well for guys). For example, the site offers free email bootcamps and, for members, interactive online courses covering specific topics like getting out of debt or how to research investments. But there are scores of places you can learn more about personal finance, places where the advice is generally very broad and one-size-fits-all. What sets LearnVest apart most is its "Ask an Expert" feature, where you can email—any time you want—a Certified Financial Planner questions about your own needs and get a more personalized response. Ask an Expert: What It Costs and How It Works Most of the LearnVest tools are free, but to access the premium courses and Ask an Expert, you'll need a membership. A one-day pass (good for 36 hours) is $4.99, three months is $39.99 and one year is $129.99. (See section on getting started below for a free day trial code.) With a membership you can ask (via an online form) as many questions as you want and get an answer back from one of the CFPs to your email inbox. The service is new, but there are currently 6 CFPs on board, plus 10 "overflow" CFPs to make sure members' questions are answered within a few hours. I received the first response in my email about 20 minutes after sending it through the online form, and subsequent back-and-forth email exchanges took place within a few hours to about half a day. Don't expect to pay for a one-day pass, push a big list of all the questions you have about your personal finances, and then get a complete plan for your future in response and be done. (I tried that and it didn't work.) What I got in response to asking half a dozen very specific questions on several different topics (budgeting, short-term saving, college savings, and more) were some concrete answers (e.g., in answer to where I should keep my emergency fund: "a savings account is still the right place to keep emergency money, or any savings that you might need to use in less than five years") as well as pointers to available LearnVest interactive courses and resources for my question topic. As the LearnVest CFP explained it, they try to avoid throwing everything at the member all at once; the day pass is really best for a quick question to make sure you're on track and see if you would want to subscribe. Example of Personalized Advice I wanted to see what kind of more detailed personalized advice I could get from a CFP online/via email, however, so I sent in a different question, this time narrowing it down to just one topic and very specific needs: Can you help me on my budget (am I on track?) and, given my current emergency savings and debt, should I pay extra to debt or to building savings? (Choosing between an emergency fund versus paying down debt is a topic we've covered before and one that can be debated either way.) When working with any advisor—whether you're meeting an accountant or trying to get technical support—the more details you can provide, the better. It saves a lot of time and effort for everyone involved. For any question you send the CFP, include all the relevant details (age, household income, tax rate, budget amounts, interest rates, etc.) For this question, for example, I included: My monthly take-home income Breakout of monthly expenses by: essential bills (mortgage, utilities, taxes), savings, discretionary expenses. (I just copied it from LearnVest's budgeting tool, which actually is one of the easiest and most sensible ways to set up a monthly budget, since it takes you through the essential bills and savings then lets you dole out the remaining money in your budget) Credit card balances, current interest rates, interest rates after promotional offer and offer expiration date I also gave a specific example of having a small emergency fund of only 3 months but about $5K in debt on a credit card with 0% interest until the spring, that will jump to 11.99% after that. If I had $500 extra a month to play with, where should it go? This isn't a cookie-cutter question, as you can see (easy answer is pay off high-interest debt first, but in this case there's no interest, for now). It's the kind of specific situation question a CFP is best for. The financial planner responded in turn with a very detailed answer, saying that the budget checked out and commenting on my plan-ahead budget categories for irregular expenses like gifts. She also gave me an actual dollar amount I should aim for in my emergency fund (enough to cover six months, and then once I reach that, one year's worth of savings, because much of my income is freelance). Turning to the second part of my question, she recommended, in this case, to focus the extra earnings on paying down the debt (even though it has a 0% interest rate right now) rather than the emergency fund, because it would give me more financial control and avoid having to pay a lot of interest when the offer expires. Makes sense, but the nice thing with this service is, if you have further questions about a piece of advice (for example, I might ask whether I should put that extra into a savings account now until the offer expires and then pay off the debt), you can, creating a dialogue. Another benefit of having a another pair of eyes looking at your plan is he/she can spot areas that you might possibly overlook: Looking at my budget line items and seeing the childcare expenses, the CFP also suggested we could discuss a 529 college savings plan (as well as other goals) in the future. So even though I didn't ask about or mention that other goal, it was something that she caught. Getting Started with LearnVest If having a personal finance advisor sounds good to you, here's how you can get started and make the most of the service. First, sign up at LearnVest.com; basic membership is free. (Optional) Try out the tracking tools. You don't actually have to use any of the financial tracking tools (e.g., connect your accounts to see where your money is going) to use the Ask an Expert feature; in fact, the CFPs don't have access to data you enter there, for privacy reasons. I do recommend you try the monthly budgeting tool (found under Tools), though, just because it's easy and gives you a handy reference when talking with your advisor, if you'll be talking about budgets or cash flow. If you're not using Mint yet, LearnVest offers a more colorful interface for categorizing your expenses, with drag-and-drop folders. Upgrade to a day pass membership ($4.99) so you can give the service a test drive for yourself. You can get a free day trial with code LVDAYPASS100. Before sending your Ask an Expert question, make a list of your top-priority financial questions. Think about the main personal finance areas and your financial goals: budgeting, debt, things you'll want to save towards for the next 5 years (such as an emergency fund or vacation), investing for things past 5 years (such as your child's college fund or a car), insurance needs, retirement, and estate planning, etc. The LearnVest courses can help you learn more about these topics and also brainstorm things you want to know. Establishing goals and creating a solid budget should be at the top of the list, so first consider these questions to see if they apply to you: How to budget for irregular expenses or if you have irregular income? How to keep to your budget or find ways to trim your budget if it isn't working? How to prioritize where you spend your money? If you have a firm budget but your biggest concern is debt, you might ask whether you should you consolidate your student loans (make sure you provide terms, rates, etc.) or how to prioritize student loans along with other debt? Or which credit cards or loans should you pay off first, if you have this much debt on these cards (list them out with the APRs and balance)? If you're considering applying for a loan (e.g., an auto loan), how to best increase your credit score (give details on your credit history and current score)? If you have your budget and debt handled already, turn to savings. You can ask how much of an emergency fund you need, given your specific household's situation, or if one type of account is better for savings. If you don't have questions about those three basics—budget, debt, or emergency savings—you can think about bigger goals like having a baby, buying a house, saving for college, or starting to invest (e.g., what types of investments to focus on? should you go with a Roth or traditional IRA?), but keep in mind that long-term planning usually requires more emails and probably a longer membership. Gather the relevant information for your question (interest rates, past spending, etc.) Enter your question in the Ask an Expert form—making it as specific and detailed as possible—and you should get an autoresponse within the hour, plus a personal answer a few hours afterwards. You can reply to the answer with more questions or to clarify. Membership Types: Day Pass vs. 3-Month Pass vs. 1-Year Plan The day pass is best for trying out the service and asking single focused questions like the ones above and mine about paying extra to debt or an emergency fund. For longer-term planning, you'll need more time for the back-and-forth email exchanges and to delve deeper. CEO and Founder Alexia von Tobel told me that a 3-month plan might be best for helping you decide on and prioritize your goals and creating next steps to reach them (e.g., a plan for getting out of debt or balancing your portfolio, etc.) If you expect to have a lot of questions due to a major event like possibly losing a job or buying a new home, the 1-year plan would give you the most value (It's also LearnVest's most popular package). They do have a refund policy to make sure everyone's satisfied. LearnVest Email Advice vs. Traditional/Other Consultations The downside of using a service like LearnVest is that the conversation is drawn out over several hours (or days) via email; it's not as immediate as sitting down for a couple of hours with a consultant in person and asking away. Also, LearnVest CFPs don't offer tax preparation advice or recommendations for specific investments. They can help you with questions like "how do I choose investments that minimize my tax burden" but they can't do your taxes for you (deferring instead to a CPA), and, because of strict industry regulations, can't tell you whether or not to buy Apple stock or a specific fund. If you're curious about whether you, based on your time horizon, should invest in an index fund or an ETF, though, or what to look for in a fund, those are the kinds of broader questions LearnVest CFPs can help with. LearnVest isn't for everyone. If you're looking for a complete, immediate financial overhaul and someone to walk you step-by-step to develop a plan when you don't know where to start or what questions to ask, a traditional CFP would be better, though more expensive. LearnVest, by nature of its "ask us a question" format, depends on you knowing what kinds of questions you want answered. (LV advisors can help you identify your priorities, develop a plan of action for your most immediate goals, and check in with you to see how you're doing, but you still need to do some legwork in asking the right questions.) If you have a lot of those personal finance questions, though, the LearnVest membership is a good value. At $39.99 for three months and $129.99 for a year, it turns out to be about $11-13 a month to be able to ask a financial expert just about any question you have about your personal finances. You can follow or contact Melanie Pinola, the author of this post, on Twitter or Google+. Share this:

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