Published on June 9th, 2010

This is a guest post from Robert Brokamp of The Motley Fool . Robert is a Certified Financial Planner and the adviser for The Motley Fool’s Rule Your Retirement service. He contributes one new article to Get Rich Slowly every two weeks.

A few weeks back, I wrote about having a financial health day at work. With the help of some of my Foolish colleagues, we’ve created a PDF that outlines how to host your own financial health day at work, including a checklist of what to consider accomplishing during the day.

Note: You can download this free special report here. [220kb PDF]

As you’ll read, a key component of the financial health day was classes taught by experts we invited to Fool HQ, including several fee-only financial advisors from the Garrett Planning Network. Which brings us to the topic of today’s post: how to pay for help from a financial professional. It all begins with my experience as one myself.

My short life as a stockbroker

Way back when (in those crazy, hazy, dot-com-zy days of the 1990s), I put on a suit every workday and headed to the offices of Prudential Securities, where I was a (very junior) member of team that managed $200 million. I started off as essentially an office gopher, and ended up being a licensed broker in a span of about two years (at which point I left to join The Motley Fool).

The term “broker” is important; it means I earned commissions for sales of stocks and mutual funds. I also was a licensed insurance agent, and earned commissions for selling insurance products such as annuities.

Now, the fellows I worked work were smart and ethical, and I’d trust them with my own money. And they’re not the only good brokers in the industry; I know plenty of them. But I saw enough to know that this is an industry driven, first and foremost, by people who want to make a lot of money for themselves. That money doesn’t materialize out of thin air; it comes straight from their clients’ accounts and into their own.

As part of my training, I spent three weeks in New York City. During the day, we heard from various representatives of the firm’s departments the bond desk, the equity analysts, etc. We weren’t being taught how to choose better investments for our clients; it was more of an introduction to how the firm worked. Then, we’d learn sales techniques. At night, we practiced them by making cold calls while instructors listened in, giving us advice after the call on how to provide more “sizzle.”

When I joined the firm, I thought I’d be getting “the keys to the kingdom” in terms identifying the best investments. After all, this is a big-name Wall Street firm; they surely knew how to beat the market. Alas, it was not true. I learned more about investing from reading a collection of good books than I did from Prudential’s training. What I did learn was that recommending certain investment products resulted in a bigger payday for the broker than recommending others regardless of what was best for the client and that many brokers weren’t able to overcome (and loath to disclose) this conflict of interest.

The fee-only way

Is there a way to get financial help without this conflict interest? Yes, there is by hiring a fee-only financial advisor. Such an advisor gets paid by the hour, by the project, or if they will be managing your money as a percentage of the assets under management. These folks have just one incentive: provide good advice. You know they will recommend what they really think is the best course of action, because they get paid the same no matter what they recommend.

Here are a few other reasons why I like fee-only planners:

• If you walk into your local Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley, or some other brokerage, the advisor you speak with will care mainly about your investments, and maybe your insurance, because that’s how they get paid. (Don’t expect much guidance on the money in your 401(k), because they can’t get paid for providing advice about that.) Fee-only advisors, on the other hand, take a look at the whole picture, from debt to cash flow to employee benefits to estate planning.