Hi everyone,
I’m looking for recommendations on how to find a financial planner to provide some guidance. We don’t need wealth management at the moment as our NW is almost $0 because of student loans (refinanced to a lower rate) but would like to speak to someone who can carve out our financial goals and future a bit more. Spouse and I think we have some handle over it but we aren’t extremely savvy and it would be great if we could speak to someone who can lay out the numbers and plans and show us different scenarios for us for the future.
Essentially we want to know how much from our gross income to save for 401k, vs cash (already have a 3 mo emergency) vs down payment of a house, vs kids, etc. We are in the market for a house soon as we’ve decided to lay our roots down in a city so I’m starting to save some money for the down payment. Also, mortgage will likely be close to what we pay in rent currently so we decided to start looking and own a house. However, we live in a MCOL and likely won’t get to 20% down. I want to save as much as possible for the house so we have cash in hand when an opportunity opens for us to buy. We have some student loans but we refinanced it for a lower rate (~4%) and pay extra every month. We pay extra every month and based on the interest calculator for loan payoff, we’d be saving only about $1k in interest for the life of the loan. For me, it’s important to have the cash in hand for a down payment than pay off student loan now. My spouse wants to be debt free ASAP.
I am also looking into FIRE. We’d like to be at least FI. I’d like to FIRE, spouse will probably work for a while as he likes what he does. We mostly have the same goals but because long term financial planning is new to the both of us, it would be nice to have someone else help us “check” our math and provide some guidance with different scenarios.
We both currently don’t have life insurance but once we have kids, we’ll probably have to think about getting something.
Who do I go for this? From some reading it seems like a fiduciary CFP would be who I need to find? We don’t really have friends who use CFPs or are FIRE minded so we don’t have anyone to get recommendations from.
I’m sorry if this is too basic of a question for the community. I’ve seen some rude posts and snarky comments recently for asking some basic questions on the sub but some of us are truly beginners and don’t have any experience with financial planning. I’m trying to learn more about planning and investing, but would like to find someone/a planner I can go to when I need help.
If I approach some banks to learn about mortgages and our options, would banks be able to provide and crunch some numbers for us besides just the mortgage estimates and options?
Thank you for your help.
Submitted May 15, 2020 at 09:49PM by turmoli https://ift.tt/3dTpZDN
