There is a reason most of us depend on our friends or ourselves for making important investment decisions. It is hard to find a dependable professional source of investment advice. There is no dearth of places to turn to for investment advice, but the decision to put a portion of your financial future in someone else’s hands should be made very carefully after collecting sufficient information.

What are the different types of financial and investment advisors?

Investment advisor is a professional firm or an individual that advises clients on investment matters. They may manage trust funds, pension funds and personal investments like stocks and mutual funds on their customer’s behalf.
Financial planners offer investment advice and help clients with savings, taxes, insurance, estate planning and retirement.
Brokers buy or sell stocks, mutual funds, bonds on their customer’s behalf.
How do I pick a good investment advisor?
Ask your friends and family if they know a good investment advisor. Also compare price quotes from multiple qualified investment advisors listed on B2B marketplaces and ask them for an appointment.

Interview your financial advisor extensively, judging their professionalism and experience. Let him or her learn about your tax situation, fiscal health and long term goals.

Ask the following questions to narrow your search for an investment advisor.

What experience do you have?
Where are you registered?
What investment services do you extend?
Do you have all the required licenses.
How much money do you manage for other clients?
How have your investments performed in the past one to ten years?
How will you assist me with my investments?
How are you paid?
Do you require a minimum investment?
How are you different from other investment or financial advisors?
Learn how your advisor gains from you
Investment advisors are paid either a percent of the asset value they handle for a customer, a fixed or hourly fee, or a combination of all. They have a fiduciary responsibility to act in your best interest while making investment decisions on your behalf. It is best to at least partially compensate the investment advisor based on his or her performance. In such an arrangement, the investment advisor makes a commission only if he or she meets your investment goals. Be wary of investments that pay a large upfront fee to the investment advisor or lock you into investments that levy a withdrawal penalty.

Check credentials and references

It is important to check references and credentials. For example in the US ask for ‘Form ADV’ for the advisors, which provides you with the advisors background, services offered, mode of payment and strategies used. Form is obtainable from the advisors, the SEC, state security regulator or those advisors managing $25 million or more in client assets. Also inquire about the advisors educational and professional background.

Know how to evaluate your advisors

Once you have hired an investment advisor, remember to evaluate his or her performance at regular interval. It is also important to meet with them regularly to review short and long term goals and to adjust your investment portfolio. Apply the following standards for evaluation.

Review performance: Check regularly how your money is doing in the investments advocated by your advisor. Evaluate portfolio performance with regard to investment goal and risk tolerance for invested assets. Use a proper benchmark or metric matching your investment strategy for various assets. For example if you have invested in stocks, use the market index as the benchmark for comparison.
Cost-benefit ratio: Though your money maybe doing well, it is important to ascertain the ratio of investment return delivered by your advisor to his or her earnings. Are you paying more than you thought for the investment return?
Quality of investment recommendations: Evaluate and test your advisors knowledge of the latest investment approaches, preparedness to stay above the rest in the changing market and insights or suggestions on new investment strategies.
Working relationship: Your investment advisor should regularly communicate and update you about your investments.
Personalized service: advisor should regularly review your investment goals and preferences and tailor the investments accordingly. You should be wary of investment advisors who show too much reliance on software programs to create your portfolio.
Hiring a good investment advisor is important to secure your financial future. Hire someone you can trust and can easily communicate with. If you advisor does not perform as expected, set up a meeting to rectify the situation else find someone who could be more helpful.

The niche you have chosen should allow creation of more than one product or service. With the technological advancements in the hosting industry, from automated control panels and scripts that simplify creation of accounts, to complete turnkey solutions; there is no need to worry about spending time on the real products sold to the customer. The main ones are keyword selection, sales copy principles, graphics, affiliate programs, product creation, online payment processing, auto responders, and search engine optimization.

Once you’ve earned money from this type of information product business, you can invest in the creation of your own products if you want, or start offering more informational products that allow you to sell your knowledge. But the creation and production costs of a similar big ticket in sequence product, although higher, are still pretty low. A key by-product of this process will be the creation of 3-D, Computer Assisted Design art.

The Association for Financial Professionals permits the following activities for repatriating funds: Research and Development activities, advertising and marketing programs, hiring and training new recruits, acquiring patent and other rights to intangible property, improving transportation, funding capital investments with the purpose of job creation and job retention & funding product responsibility or environmental claims.

It prohibits certain activities like: Tax payments, Payment of executive recompense, Payment of dividends, Redemption of stocks, Debt investments and Portfolio investments. Therefore, before repatriating the money, you must consider whether it is worth or not.

Checklist on what artist and product development necessitate includes: Exceptional vocals, musicianship and/or songwriting skills, Continued education and enhancement of musical skills, Quality equipment, Performance ability, Image creation and maintenance, Plan of action, goal setting, excellent promotion materials including photographs, press releases and artwork, Business management skills, Marketing, Publicity and Promotion knowledge, Online and Offline Professional management, Basic knowledge of recording, producing, engineering, and mastering, Basic knowledge of manufacturing, distribution, and sales online, brick and mortar and air-play, Good choices in members, staff and advisors, Physical and mental preparedness, Basic knowledge of finances, accounting Law and legal issues etc.

The goals for doing so are for the product owner to: Communicate the whole, Determine and communicate when releases are needed, Determine what functionality is sufficient for each release & focus on business value derived from the releases. The delivery team on the other hand will see the whole, learn about the steps to realize the vision, learn the business priorities, provide technical input to the roadmap and provide estimates for the projected features. The salesperson must lead the prospect through the various decision criteria needed in order to secure a sale. Whether your idea is the development of a product, launch of a service business, or even the creation of an event or program for a non-profit, creativity is the root of all entrepreneurial efforts starting with the vision itself.

People quickly learn to spend their time on marketing and product creation, rather than repetitive tasks. Apart from empowering companies and individuals, there should be a particular focus on identifying labor intensive businesses that have the potential to make a significant and positive impact on employment creation as well as those businesses that have a product or service offering for export markets with the final objective of booming local economies.

One of the keys to succeeding in information product creation is to break the process up into discrete steps. This frequently isn’t an instinctive reaction for the typical information marketer. Especially on the internet where small sized learning products are the norm.

However, it is extremely important to your ultimate success. In fact, I would go so far as to say that if you don’t do this you probably won’t succeed… even when you are starting out let alone as you move forward.

Your product creation system should do this for you if only to help you to understand the overall task.

But why?

In this article, I’m going to ignore chunking and focus on the practical aspects. That’s not to say that chunking isn’t important. It is. It’s important to understanding and to learning the process. But while you can use the same chunks as you move forward, long term your focus needs to be on the operation of the system not the understanding of it. Unless of course you are constantly training new people!

So why is chunking important to long term use of the product creation process? (Yes, I know systems design uses a different term for this process but I’m not teaching you systems design. So I’m going to use the word learning content designers use.)

The first reason that having individual discrete tasks is important is one of schedule estimation. Frequently it is very difficult to estimate how long the total task of creating a product will take. After all, the size and type of the products matters as does the number of products in your product funnel. And those are just the most obvious elements. However, estimating a discrete task is often much easier. The total can then be estimated as the total of the discrete tasks.

Secondly, scheduling a large task can be problematic. However, by segmenting the task into a number of discrete tasks, you gain a much greater flexibility in scheduling. Not only that but as your business begins to add people you are able to schedule multiple people to the product creation.

Finally, segmenting a large task into smaller discrete tasks allows you to have much better control over the product creation. This affects two different areas — status and quality.

By segmenting your process into discrete tasks you are able to schedule and record the progress at much more detailed level. As a result you are more in control of the status of the product creation. You know what everyone is doing. When they should complete it. And how much it should cost. You also know exactly what has been done.

You also improve your overall quality. Instead of waiting until everything is done you can check quality as you go. This allows you to immediate react to low quality products without absorbing their costs. This means that you have less rework and your rework costs less. And if the product is not going to meet its quality requirement you will know about it in time to stop the development, change the requirement or fix the product.