WASHINGTON Can you trust your financial planner to tell you what to do about your home mortgage? Whether you should go ahead and buy that second home? Or, sell the house you inherited and put the proceeds into mutual funds?

Maybe, and maybe not.

After enduring more than a decade of criticism because they take investment-product commissions, many financial advisors have moved to a fee-only form of compensation under which they get a percentage of assets under management.

Sell a $100,000 mutual fund portfolio and buy a house instead, and youve just cut your advisors fee by $1,000 or even more, since the advisory fee is based on the amount of money in the stock portfolio. And some say that smells like a conflict of interest.

Of course, most advisors arent going to give bad advice just to earn themselves an extra grand, but conflicts like that can push a complicated calculation one way or the other.

Theres a second reason why your financial advisor may not be the best advisor for real estate: For the most part, he (or she) hasnt focused on real property, but on stocks and mutual funds.

Even those full service advisors who cover debt management and taxes probably havent spent a lot of time studying real estate investments. Now that stock-disillusioned investors are turning to real estate investments (if they can afford them), advisors are trying to catch up in a hurry.

But a real estate industry advisor may not be the best place to look for impartial advice, either. These sales people do work on commissions; they get paid only when you buy a property or sell a property. If a typical financial advisor would tell you to forget the rental house and buy bonds, a real estate agent would have you cash in your bonds to buy that second home.

There are no simple answers when a client begins asking questions about investments and mortgage debt, writes Joe Tomlinson, a Newburyport, Mass. financial advisor, in a recent issue of the Journal of Financial Planning.

He tells advisors to make estimates about long-term returns of real estate, debt and stocks, and then test the earnings against the possibility that the economy will behave differently than expected.

How can you make the right calls when youre comparing real estate to stocks and deciding how to treat long-term debt?

Learn some of the math yourself, listen to investment advisors and real estate agents, and then hire an independent certified public accountant who knows taxes and can run some numbers for you.

The cleanest way to make these decisions is to compare the long-term costs and benefits of the mortgage and the home with the long-term costs and benefits of a financial portfolio. Thats something thats really hard to do.

For example, when figuring out how much a mortgage really costs you, remember that its likely to be tax deductible. Stock market earnings (assuming you ever see them again) would be taxable, either as gains or income.

Over the long term, real estate tends to rise less quickly than stocks, but your starting point today is the middle of a stock market bear and the early stages of a real estate rally.

Stocks are more liquid than real estate, so you can get your money out easier if you need it. Real estate can pay you back with rental income, tax breaks and personal satisfaction.

Given the variables, its easy to understand why Tomlinson tells advisors to set up spreadsheets with dozens of data points, but here are a few pointers: Its better to have more than one kind of asset, so dont sell all your stocks (especially during this market debacle) to buy real estate, or cash in your house to buy stocks.

Remember that real estate prices rarely fall as precipitously as stock prices do, but that you can still overpay for a piece of property and wait years to get your money out. Real estate investments cost more in extras maintenance and management, for example than do financial investments.

And with 30-year fixed-rate mortgages running just over 6 percent (and under 6 percent for 15-year mortgages), its hard to justify burning the mortgage early, even though theres no place now where you can earn more than 6 percent on your money safely. Youve got an 80 percent chance of earning more than that on your stock portfolio if you can wait at least 10 years to cash out, says Tomlinson.