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Whether you need help with your household budget, planning your retirement, or support as a DIY investor, there are lots of great people out there who can help you meet your goals. This directory of Canadian fee-for-service planners, advisors, and coaches is to help you find the right person for you.
Caveats: the important caveat is that this is meant to be an open listing and these are not recommendations. I don’t have the resources to vet any of these listings or to label these people as approved in any way.
For planners/advisors/coaches: The directory is intended for people who use a fee-for-service, transparent business model: whether you charge by the hour, by the project, or have a subscription type arrangement, people should know what they’re paying and the fees should be independent of the plan and recommendation. Whether the directory is for people who exclusively use that business model or offer it as one of several ways to get advice — but mostly fee-for-service-based — is still in the air, so at the moment I’ll post both kinds of advisors. If you are a fee-for-service advisor, planner, or money coach, and want to add yourself to the directly simply fill out the intake form here (or update your existing listing). Your listing should appear in a few weeks-to-months.
Ordering: feel free to filter and sort the sheet as you see fit to help you find the person who can best help you with your finances. At the moment the list is ordered by join date (those who filled in the survey first are at the top), however I plan on randomizing the order every few months for fairness. Note that you do not need to request editing permissions to order and filter, you can create a temporary view for that, or make a copy to your own Google Drive.
Details: A few common services have been broken out into columns so you can quickly scan for someone offering the service you need — just look for the green highlighted box and the “yes” inside. The other fields give the advisors a few dozen words to describe their offerings more free-form, and to highlight any particular specialties within that large menu of service offerings, or niche services that don’t fit the set columns. The sheet is quite large, be sure to scroll down (for more advisors) and right (for more information including contact details).
Why fee-for-service? Making the client-advisor relationship more transparent and free of conflicts-of-interest will, in my opinion, make for better advice that suits the needs of Canadians. Many of the advisors offering their services for a project or hourly fee could do better collecting hidden commissions or intermingling their advisory role with a sales role — they have taken a conscious step towards transparency, which I think is a good thing. In this blog post I talk a bit more about how I see advice and specifically fee-for-service advice fitting into your financial life.
Other Lists: Steadyhand Investment Management has also compiled a list, restricting theirs to advice-only planners. Their list also has a neat feature in that they have asked what the lead times are to see a new client. The Advice-Only Planners Forum has a page listing their members, and FPAC has a membership listing that you can filter by compensation model (and other factors).
Parting note: I’ve put a lot of resources into teaching Canadians how to invest for themselves through my book (The Value of Simple: A Practical Guide to Taking the Complexity Out of Investing) and online course, Practical Index Investing for Canadians. Many people believe that advisors exist to help get them into investments, which just isn’t the case — even when you can handle the investing part on your own, the planning part is a totally separate skill and task. While learning about and doing some parts of your budgeting, planning, and investing yourself makes sense to me, it doesn’t eliminate the need to find some help from a planner or coach at certain parts of your life.
Questions or comments related to the directory? Send me an email at directory[at]valueofsimple.ca
