People enlist the help of a financial planner because of the complexity of knowing how to perform the following:

* Providing direction and meaning to financial decisions;
* Allowing the person to understand how each financial decision affects the other areas of finance; and
* Allowing the person to adapt more easily to life changes in order to feel more secure.

The best results of working with a comprehensive financial planner, from an individual client or family’s perspective are:

* To create the greatest probability that all financial goals (anything requiring both money and planning to achieve) are accomplished by the target date, and
* To have a frequently-updated sensible plan that is so proactive it is unlikely any major unexpected financial event will negatively affect the plan, and
* To make intelligent financial choices all along the way (whether to “buy or lease” whether to “refinance or pay-off” etc.).

Before working with a comprehensive financial planner, a client should establish that the planner is competent and worthy of trust, and will act in the client’s interests, rather than being primarily interested in selling the client financial products for his own financial benefit. As the relationship unfolds, an individual financial planning client’s objective in working with a comprehensive financial planer is to clearly understand what needs to be done to implement the financial plan created for them. So, in many ways, a financial planner’s step-by-step written implementation plan of action items, created after the plan is completed, has more value to many clients than the plan itself. The comprehensive written lifetime financial plan is a technical document utilised by the financial planner, the written implementation plan of action is just a few pages of action items required to implement the plan; a much more “usable” document to the client.