If you’re in the market for a financial advisor, you probably got a referral or two from friends or family. Yet even if advisors come highly recommended, you’ll still want to do your own research and find out who they are and how they work.

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You can find a checklist of questions at the Plannersearch.org website, maintained by the Financial Planning Association, a professional association for financial planners. Below, we drill down into some of the most important questions to keep in mind before signing.

1. How do you get paid?

It can be hard to know how—and how much—you’re paying your advisor. Advisors should be forthright about how they make money off you. Here are three possible ways:

Fee only. The advisor only gets paid by you, not through commissions for selling particular products. He or she can be paid hourly, as a percentage of assets or through a retainer. Advisors who bill a percentage of assets under management typically charge 1 percent, though they may reduce fees for higher account balances, since it’s not much more work to manage a $2 million portfolio as it is to run a $500,000 one.

Some advisors are flexible about the exact arrangement. For clients who don’t have much to invest, we will just do it on an hourly basis, said certified financial planner Daniel Lash of VLP Financial Advisors. Then we’ll stay in touch periodically if they need our help.

Commissions. The advisor is paid to trade stocks or funds.

Fee-based. That’s where things get murky. Some advisors use a combination of the two methods; they’re paid a fee by the client for advice and then commissions on some of the products they sell.

Fee-based can mean so many different things, said certified financial planner John Litscher, a partner with the Capital Group. You can still offer investments with commissions, but it’s hard for consumers to really understand the terminology and what they’re getting.

In the wake of the financial crisis, more consumers are interested in knowing whether their financial advisor is a fiduciary. The fiduciary standard says that an investment advisor must always put the client’s interests above his or her own, even if that means passing up a juicy commission. Any advisor who provides personalized financial planning must act as a fiduciary.