Decoding Financial Advisors is a new five-part video series that pulls back the curtain on an industry that’s managing trillions of dollars of Americans’ life savings, yet remains opaque and almost impossible for individuals to fully understand. Who are you really hiring? How are financial advisors paid? What are they selling you, and whose interests come first? Decoding Advisors takes the financial advisory industry apart, piece by piece, and translates it into plain English so you can see exactly what you’re dealing with before you hand over your money. The follow-up series, What Good Advice Looks Like, shows you what to do with that clarity.

Most people choose a financial advisor the way they choose a doctor in an emergency: they need help, they ask someone they know for a name, and they assume that person has already done the full vetting. But chances are, like you, they didn’t know what to look for either.

Financial advice isn’t a profession governed by one set of uniform standards. Financial Advisors are all over the map and vetting requires due diligence, including understanding experience, qualifications, credentials – especially in an industry that makes it extraordinarily difficult to know exactly who you’re hiring. Yet the burden to vet an advisor is all on you. Titles can be confusing, fees are often hard to decipher, and even the word “fiduciary” may not mean what you think it means. Across five episodes, Decoding Financial Advisors gives you the questions, context and inside knowledge you need to understand who’s really sitting across the table before you trust them with your money.

Knowing how the industry works is the defensive half of the equation. It puts you ahead of most other people and helps protect you by spotting the conflicts, incentives and warning signs that can lead you to the wrong advisor. But recognizing what bad advice looks like doesn’t tell you what good advice should look like, feel like, or actually deliver.

That’s where the follow-up video series, What Good Advice Looks Like, begins. Now that you know how to look under the hood of the industry to weed out the bad actors, we’ll show you what a successful financial planning relationship looks like in practice: what a good advisor should be asking you, why the best advisors listen first and take the time to understand your whole financial life, not just your investment portfolio.

Because there’s a lot more at stake than investment returns: tax planning, real estate decisions, retirement income, and making sure your money lasts as long as you do. You’ll learn what you should expect in return, how advice should translate into actual decisions, how the right advice evolves with your life, not with the next quarter, and ultimately, how to make sure you’re getting your money’s worth from the advice you’re paying for.