A business in personal financial planning can be a great venture for stay-at-home moms. If you know your money, if you know the rules of money, and if you know how to network and convince people of your integrity, this could be a very rewarding business to be in.
Now even if you know money very well personally, to actually get into business doing personal financial planning requires a bit more than that. You need to gain experience and expertise. If you have a finance or accounting related degree, that would be a big help. If you don’t, you could still get in there. But you really need to be able to convince the people in your circle first to trust you with their money.
This is a business that runs on reputation. Your entire focus has to be about building one, starting with the people who actually know you already.
If you aren’t totally trained and experienced in this, it would help if you spent a couple of years first reading up and attending seminars and training sessions to really understand the state of the business today.
You will need to learn about the laws that govern personal financial planning services, how to invest, how to manage taxes, retirement schemes and where the market trends are headed at the time.
There are plenty of colleges that offer courses in personal financial planning – tax planning, investment mining, mutual funds, stock market investing and so on. Even the people you know already don’t really know how good you are with financial planning. They may hesitate to hand the reins over to you. It helps a great deal too if you to apply for certification and financial planning – with the Certified Financial Planner Board of Standards.
In the initial stages, as you set about establishing a business in personal financial planning, you need to pay a lot of attention to building up a client base. A good way to do that would be at first to offer low-cost services. Financial planners your a well-paid bunch, and those people resent having to pay them their fees.
They will likely view your lack of greed in a positive way. Try to ask your first satisfied customers for references. Prepare flyers and little brochures that explain personal financial planning to everyone. People love that; and the way in which you explain everything will rub off on your business.
You don’t usually need a license to practice personal financial planning. If you are selling real estate, mutual funds, bonds or insurance though, you may need a couple of permits.