How to Become a Professional Financial Planner

In this episode of Motley Fool Money, Motley Fool personal finance expert Robert Brokamp discusses:

• The benefits of being a professional financial planner.
• The future of the profession, especially in a world of AI.
• How to start exploring the financial planning profession.
• Considerations for making a career transition.

To catch full episodes of all The Motley Fool's free podcasts, check out our podcast center. When you're ready to invest, check out this top 10 list of stocks to buy.

A full transcript is below.

This podcast was recorded on April 11, 2026.

Robert Brokamp: This week on the Saturday Personal Finance Edition of Motley Fool Money, choosing financial planning as a career. I'm Robert Brokamp. Two weeks ago, my guest was certified financial planner practitioner Hannah Moore, who talked about how to find the right financial planner for you. This week, Hannah's back to talk about the benefits, challenges, and logistics of becoming a professional financial planner. Back in the 1990s, I was an elementary school teacher living in an expensive city and not making much money. I figured that I should learn more about personal finance, and the more I learned, the more I loved it. So I became a financial advisor, which eventually led to my current job at The Motley Fool. Perhaps you, too, have caught the personal finance bug and have thought to yourself, maybe I could do this for a living.

If so, you'll definitely want to listen to our next guest, who is Hannah Moore, the founder of Amplified Planning, the owner and principal financial planner at Guiding Wealth, and the recipient of many awards, including being named by Barron’s as 10 People to Watch in Wealth Management and Wealth Management's Innovator of the Year in 2024. She's also the creator of The Externship, an outstanding summer program for aspiring financial planners and people who want to build their own financial plan. I was fortunate enough to be able to attend last summer, and registration for this summer's externship is now open. Hannah, welcome back to the show.

Hannah Moore: Yes, thank you so much for having me.

Robert Brokamp: What do you see as the main benefits of being a professional financial planner?

Hannah Moore: This is such a great question. It's just like, where do you start? Like, every day I get to come into the office, and I get to talk with clients about their money. I don't know if your listeners are anything like me, but that is, like, one of my favorite things to do just in life in general. I remember being in high school. I would drive around and just listen to the personal finance, talk shows on the radio. Even as a high schooler, I'd be like, well, here's what I would tell them to do. But that's now my day job. That's what I get to do every single day, and I get to bring a level of expertise to so many different clients.

I am very, very impact-driven, and every day I get to come into the office, and I get to see the direct impact that we are having on our clients' lives. Like, it is not an abstract thing. It's like I am in meetings with clients, helping them navigate their financial lives, helping them figure out what are the goals that they want to do, and how can we make that possible? What are the constraints that are in there? It is so incredibly rewarding. I can't imagine any other field. I said this before and somebody's like, well, what about teachers? I'm like, Yes, that's fair. But, you get to deal with people's money. But the impact that you can have every single day on somebody's life. I come home from work every day with my cup filled. Like, I'm like, giving out of the overflow because I love this work so much.

I'm a mom of three kids, obviously, wife, mom of three kids, and this is such a great career for balancing all of the things. I took my lunch break and a little bit extra time to go get the Easter eggs for the kids for their things. There's just a lot of things that you can incorporate into your life because of the pace of financial planning and what this looks like. I love the people side. I love the numbers. I love how they blend together. Well, now I love how there's not a black and white answer. That took me some time to get there, but I really love how money is not as simple. Like, it really can be this really complex thing. You can make a really good living in this field. There's lots of studies out there showing what the salaries can be in this space. For me, this is like this perfect trifecta of the work you get to do, the work life balance that you get to have, and getting paid well to do.

Robert Brokamp: You say about radio. That's actually how I got interested in personal finance myself driving in my junkie car as an elementary school teacher and hearing a talk show about money and thinking, this is actually interesting. I wish someone had taught me this when I was in high school, and that started me down this road, so it's funny you mentioned that, too. You love the profession. Someone who's seeing this podcast probably cares about money and thinking, well, maybe I should get into it. Looking 5, 10, 15 years down the road is now a good time to get into the profession.

Hannah Moore: Solidly in the camp. I am very, very bullish on this field right now. Financial planning as a field is growing immensely. There's been some research that came out in the last year or two. So this Cerulli study said that by 2034, we're going to have a 100,000-advisor shortage. There's a couple factors that are playing into that. One is that we have an aging advisor population, so a lot of people are being like, oh, they're going to have to retire someday. They have been saying that my entire career. The problem is, when you love your job, you don't really want to retire. There's a little bit of, like what does that look like? It's also telling about this career as well when you don't want to retire from it. But the second piece of it is that more and more Americans are wanting financial planning help. This has become a bigger demand in this space, and so this is a growing field where more and more people just need help in their personal finances. We're seeing this as this is one of those expansive fields where we're seeing AI is coming. We can't avoid it. AI is going to be here. But really at the core, this is about relationships and just the more and more people who are recognizing their need for help in their finances and they're not sure where to go. The studies are crazy. Like, there's literally if you can extrapolate the data it's tens of millions of Americans who want financial advice, are willing to pay for it and don't know where to go. There is a huge macro need for this within our country.

Robert Brokamp: That's one of the reasons why we've had you on the show here because I hear from our members and our listeners all the time. Like, I would love to work with a financial advisor I trust, maybe on an hourly basis or maybe assets under management, and they can't find somebody, so there's definitely a need. I've read the studies as well about what percentage of financial advisors are going to be retiring over the next decade. It's anywhere 30%-40%. You're right, but a lot of them actually stay in the profession a long time. By the way, I've also heard the same about accountants and tax professionals. Those are people who don't want to stay in the profession because by the time the easter six Easter taxes. So I mean, that's adjacent, and many people do both. They are a certified financial planner as well as an enrolled agent, and they do the taxes in the firm as well. It does seem like over the next 5, 10 years, there's going to be a need for this, especially as more of the baby boomers and Gen X start to retire.

Hannah Moore: Well, to dovetail off of that we run the exerts. We do all this training for people wanting to get into the space. The story you said of I went looking for a financial planner, I couldn't find them, or the one I was using, I was like, wait, what are they doing? That is such a familiar story to so many people who are entering this space.

Robert Brokamp: Yeah, many people came to The Motley Fool as a do it yourself or after getting burned by a financial professional. We know that most of them are good people, but some of them are not, so the industry definitely needs more ethical financial planners. You mentioned AI, so I have to ask the obligatory AI question. How much do you think the profession will be affected by people just entering all their information into Claude and getting a financial plan?

Hannah Moore: It's so fascinating. I think you bring up such a good point, and it's going to be something that's going to be here. I was talking to somebody recently, and they made this observation I think was really telling. They're like you used to go to a financial planner to get the recommendations, and now you're going to be going to a financial planner with recommendations and being like, does this actually fit? Does this actually fit my life? Does this fit my family's life? Is this the right advice? The numbers right? Like, let's not get too ambitious. I mean, we've all seen some things, and they're going to be like, can we trust this? It's so fascinating because my friends in the behavioral finance space, they have obviously doing a lot of research around this, and implementation is one of the biggest issues within financial planning. It's easy to give good advice. Spend less than you make. That's simple. It's really simple to say. Go invest some money. Like, these are really basic concepts, and yet, why aren't they implemented? A lot of this is going to be this implementation. So much of what I find that we do as financial planners is help with the actual implementation of it, because it's not enough just to know what to do. That's going to be commoditized.

One of my friends in the behavioral finance space, they've done some research around this, and they said that one of the top indicators of implementation is the relationship that the person who's been given the advice has with who's giving them the advice. This is such a relationship business, and that matters a lot. Are people's relationships with Claude or with AI or whoever, is that strong enough to push the pass into the implementation? I mean, I hope it is. Like, if I could waive my wand and everybody could have answers to all of their financial planning questions and be in a better spot financially, like, yes, I would do that in a heartbeat. Because that would mean that everybody was set up for success financially, but we know that's not the reality, and so that's what's fascinating in this AI. We have this whole implementation piece. We still have a lot of questions around what can it do and what can't it do, and what are its limitations? I'm in a lot of conversations with some of these tech startups that are starting. The biggest question is who holds a liability on. Who holds a fiduciary responsibility with their clients, and what's fascinating is we're seeing a lot of these companies saying, I don't want to touch that. There's a lot of questions still around what this looks like.

But going back to this basis of where are we going to be with AI, I think we're going to be seeing that the focus of the financial planner is going to be less on entering the data. We're seeing a lot of that being systematized. We're seeing a lot of that work being done on that space. It's going to be more, can you sit across from the client and engage well with a client? That's going to be what's going to be differentiating for so many planners. I don't know if the powers to be would listen to this, but in my ideal world, what this would do is it would enable financial planners to work with more clients, to be able to be giving really good financial advice, to be able for us to go down market. There are so many people in Middle America who need good financial advice. Like, can this help give them financial advice? If so, I think that's a huge win. But I'm still bullish on the fact that I think that we're still going to need people to do a lot of this work, maybe not so much as the number crunching as much. They're going to have to know it, and that's going to be an interesting challenge. But it really is going to be more people are going to need financial advice.

ADVERTISEMENT: Mark Chrisler: When Johann Rall received the letter on Christmas Day, 1776, he put it away to read later. Maybe he thought it was a season's greeting and wanted to save it for the fireside. But what it actually was was a warning delivered to the Hessian colonel, letting him know that General George Washington was crossing the Delaware and would soon attack his forces. The next day, when Rall lost the battle of Trenton and died from two colonial boxing day musket balls, the letter was found unopened in his vest pocket. As someone with 15,000 unread emails in his inbox, I feel like there's a lesson there. Oh, well, this is the constant, a history of getting things wrong. I'm Mark Chrisler. Every episode, we look at the bad ideas, mistakes, and accidents that misshaped our world. Find us at constantpodcast.com or wherever you get your podcasts.

Robert Brokamp: The liability question is interesting. We hear at The Motley Fool, if I want to create a tool on our website, our lawyers will be very careful about saying you can't do anything that even smells like personalized advice because The Motley Fool website, the free site is not a registered investment advisor. Yet you can go to ChatGPT and Claude and all these other places and basically get personalized advice. Where is that going to be in the future? Is it going to change so that we at The Motley Fool can give personalized advice or is it going to be at some point, whenever you ask, like, here's all my information, can I retire? It just says, no, I'm sorry, I cannot give you that advice.

Hannah Moore: It's fascinating. Because we're so highly regulated. That's how people don't always know about the space. Like, if I give advice, like, I'm liable for that advice. Like, people can come back and sue me, and I don't see anything about the SEC lowering their standards right now. If anything, they're going to be going more in that consumer protection. But my husband and I just bought a new house a couple of months ago. I remember sitting there and I'm like, late at night, this is my day job, and I'm doing this. We know everyone's doing this. I sat there, and I was like, here's my income. Here's me and my facts set of my situation. How much house can I afford? It gave me an answer and had the confidence of AI, is I like to say, around the answer. Then, I saw it, and at first, I was like, okay, perfect. It was so interesting watching, like, can I trust this? Like, I'm literally like, potentially putting my financial life at risk on this AI and it scared me. I had to shut my laptop. I was just like, oh, my gosh, it's just too much, so then we're selling our house. I go into ChatGPT and I'm like, how much should list my house. Giving it all the information all of that, and it had this side by side, you know how it does that. The the side-by-side comparison, tell me which one you liked better. It was $150,000 difference.

Robert Brokamp: Wow.

Hannah Moore: That was 30% difference based upon the price that we were looking at. I was like, that's actually terrifying. Again, it was another one he said, shut my laptop, like, I need to go call my realtor. I think we're going to continue to see some of these pieces because it'll be interesting to see if lawsuits come and how this plays out from the liability standpoint.

Robert Brokamp: Yeah, I see the numbers that are wrong. I mean, I'm old school. I write my own articles, but I'll throw it into AI and just fact-check this and highlight anything that's wrong. They'll say, you, you're wrong about this fact, and I'm like, no, I'm not. I know I'm absolutely sure that I'm right about this.

Hannah Moore: Well, and that's where it's going to be so fascinating, especially for people coming into the space, because you're going to have to be smart enough to catch that because it's going to be giving you a certain answer. Like, there's going to be certainty in its answer, and you're going to have to be able to say, no, that's not right. Even, like, we're training so many of these financial planners coming into the space, we're looking at, what are the new skill sets that people are going to have to come in. It's a fascinating time to get into financial planning.

Robert Brokamp: Let's get into that. Let's say someone is intrigued about becoming a financial professional. Where and how should they start doing their research into whether this really is the profession for them?

Hannah Moore: Oh, I love that. There's going to be a couple of answers. There's going to be just obviously talking with your family and friends. Part of that is just seeing like, is this something that fits you. Like, I think that's a big piece that we forget about. Like, is this a good career choice for you? Oftentimes, your family and friends can be a great mirror to look at yourself and be like, oh yeah, we have so many people in The Externship who say that. They're like, yeah, I started talking about this as maybe I want to do this. All my friends were like, yes, please, like, this makes so much sense that you would do this. I think just getting that like, hey, is this right? When we look at the education piece, the days are almost gone, not all gone, but they're almost gone where you can just come in if you will hang your shingle, and just start selling stuff and make a lot of money on it. Those days are hopefully behind us, not entirely, but mostly behind us.

People are going to be expecting a certain level of education. They're going to be expecting a certain level of skill set or knowledge that you're going to have. Largely that's going to be in that safety designation. If you're curious about this career, that's going to be something that you're going to want to explore. What are those classes? What does that look like? What are those pieces on there? Then not to self-promote too much here. But The Externship is also a really great way. To really get your toes in the water, I'm just seeing like, what does this career? What does it look like? When we started this, we're really looking at, like, how can we just showcase what financial planning is and what the different options are within this field, and it's asynchronous? We try to fit it within your life, but really giving you, like, this is what a day in the life of a financial planner really does look like, and does this fit you? Helping you see that inside look really can make a big difference.

Robert Brokamp: Let's get a little bit into The Externship. Yeah. It's so valuable. I just signed up randomly. We don't have any deal together. We never met before. I just had heard about it, and I thought, well, of course, this is what the industry needs because there's no other way to really learn whether this is right for you. But part of it, too, is you get access to all financial planning software, that you get to play with, maybe check out your own situation, but also get an idea of, like, if I'm a financial planner, this is the type of software I'm going to be interacting with on a regular basis. You bring in all these guests, all people from all walks of life who've taken their experience and turned it into this interesting, unique, successful financial planning career.

Hannah Moore: Started in 2020, so it was a response to COVID. We started seeing students who are losing their internships. Give me a little bit of the backstory. I think which will help you give some context. We were looking at students who are losing their internships, and we're like, how can we help them? That's when we started, we were on this full sprint to get this program across the finish line, and we thought we were targeting juniors and seniors in college who had some knowledge. We opened up this program. We were open for three weeks, and it went viral. Reddit was one of our biggest referral sources. Like, it was crazy. It was one of the only offerings that was available at the time. Like, it's still wild when I think back to it. What we saw was what you're talking about. There's a huge need for how do you get into this space, because you think about it traditionally. Somebody's listening to this. If they're in college, you can go that college path route. It's not as defined as I would like, but there's a pretty clear pathway, and firms understand that.

But if you're a career changer and you're looking into this field, number 1, it's complicated as all get out of where are you going to land? Like, I can give you a name of any company, any of the big companies, and there's so many different career paths within that. How is it structured? There's so much that's there. If you were a career changer, you had to just get lucky and know somebody or nowhere to land, and then you had to go quit your job and then hope it was successful. Like, there is a lot of risk that comes into play with that. But what we found in 2020, when we built this program, I mean, it was built with the constraints of COVID. It was built with the constraints of, we can't meet in person. Everyone's going to be busy. We're all at home. We still have collective trauma around this. It was such a time. But what we found was that this program really gave access to financial planning as a career.

Since then, this program continues to get bigger, and we really view ourselves as a welcome at into financial planning. We really view ourselves. Like, if you are interested in this career, it is a great spot to come and just come and see what it looks like. Because if I had to wager money on this, most of your listeners probably can't just go quit their job for two months to go try out an internship and then go back to their day job if that didn't work. Like, that's just not realistic for most of us in the world. But to give you this perspective of being like, hey, you can do that in the evenings. The majority of our people are working full-time jobs who take this program. Do it in the evenings, on your commute, on the weekends. You get to see all aspects. Like, I mean, the experts are phenomenal, and it gives you just this view of, like, what are the top experts in financial planning? What does this look like? The software, getting to see client meetings. You get to see the whole thing of what this career is. Then one of my favorite parts about this is that if you go through this program, you're going to know where you want to land. You're going to be like, oh, that person really resonated with me. I want to serve clients like that and do it this way. It really gives you a much stronger framework for pursuing this career. We always say we throw as many resources as we possibly can at the externs because we want to see them be successful in this field.

Robert Brokamp: What's the runway? Let's say someone wants to explore it. They start doing things like The Externship, they might start taking classes to become a certified financial planner, any other classes, anything like that? Are we talking a year, two years, three years, or is it really variable?

Hannah Moore: It really is variable when we're talking about career changers. Career changers are our top demographic, which is fascinating in The Externship, people often think, oh, it's going to be students. We do have a good amount of students, but career changers are, by and large, our biggest group. A lot of it's going to depend on people's personal situations. like, we have a number of people who often joke they're like, I'm waiting to be fired with that severance package. Once I get that severance package, then I'm going to be jumping in, so it's a funny thing. We just had somebody on our monthly training. He's like, I just got fired, guys. It was like this whole celebration because everyone knew what he was talking about, and he's like, I'm going in now. What we find is usually it's going to take we see 1-4 years as a runway on this. It's going to depend on where you're located at, that can make a big difference. It's going to be your personal network.

We see a lot of folks do The Externship and say, like, oh, this is for me. Some people put their resume together right away and start sending it out. That obviously, shortens that pathway. Other people are like, I want to get some of these CFP courses under my belt. I want to make sure that this is a right path for me. Really some people are quietly looking as they're going through this. But we usually see there is that runway, like one year, really three years, maybe four years on this, but a lot of that is going to be dictated on, like, your situation. Some people are like, I'm going to get through all of that CFP coursework as fast as I can. It really just depends on the person in situation. But it is not just a flip the switch and then they're gone. Although it can be.

Robert Brokamp: I assume that part of it is also looking at your own personal finances because you might be taking a big pay cut to get an entry level job or do something else, and you have to have the savings to live off for that 1, 2, 3 years before you're back up to where you were.

Hannah Moore: Absolutely. It's the number one question we get in the internship is okay, like, most career changers, they realize they're going to have to take a pay cut. Usually. Not all the time, but usually they're like, and what does a runway look like for that? That's going to be we talk about where you land is really important. There are going to be some firms where that is a really defined process for you. Where it's going to be just really clear. Like, here's going to be the metrics that you need to hit to get that promotion. Those are going to be jobs that career changers want. That they're going to be like, I want to have that trajectory of going up. There's going to be other roles. I was just talking to one guy, and he's stuck in a pair planner. He's just like, I'm here, but I'm doing it, like I'm doing the work, but I also, don't feel like I have that upward mobility, and he's quasi-retired. I don't think he needs this job for the money. Like, I think he's done his financial plan well.

But what's interesting, though, on that is Schwab has done some research around, where do financial planners find employees? One's a personal network, two's university, and then three is other firms. It is a lot easier for him to go find another job because he has a job in this space already. For him, his play is going to be a little bit different. He's likely to probably go and move to a different firm from where he's at. But yeah, again, that's one of those really strategic questions you got to be asking if you're going to be coming in as a career changer.

Robert Brokamp: Any final advice for people considering a career as a financial planner?

Hannah Moore: I could sing his praises all day long. The impact we have in clients' lives. The other piece I do want to mention, we're talking about getting a job. Past entrepreneurship is one of the big reasons people are interested in financial planning right now. About 50% of our folks, that is one of the reasons why they're interested in this. It's not just about getting the job. It can also be about being an entrepreneur and starting your own business and what that looks like. But I will tell you, it is one of the most rewarding careers that you can possibly be at. I know you just had me on a couple of weeks ago, Robert, but one of the stories I told was this is one that we're dealing with like this week with our clients. Husband passed away on Saturday, and we're guiding this client. We've been guiding them all the way through this process. It is so fulfilling to be able to be there around people's big life events and to be able to do that and to bring a level of expertise, where I know a lot of your listeners might be DIY, and they might love this stuff, and I love this stuff, too.

There's a whole host of people out there who are like, I'm good. Like, this is a great podcast. We're like, please don't make me listen to that podcast. I don't want that information. I need help. There's so many people out there who are looking for advice and that they want it, and they're just looking for the right person. What I also love about The Externship is I see how many different backgrounds there are of people, and it makes me so excited seeing them get into financial planning and hearing their story and hearing their why because all I can see is the client that is, like, looking for that person and hasn't been able to find it. It's just so exciting, thinking about all these people coming into financial planning and the people that they're going to be serving and the lives that they're going to be impacting.

Robert Brokamp: Well, Hannah, thanks so much for joining us.

Hannah Moore: Yes, thank you so much for having me.

Robert Brokamp: That, my Foolish friends, is the show. Thanks for spending part of your weekend with us and thanks. As always, Dupart Shannon, the engineer for this episode. People on the program may have interest in the investments they talk about, and The Motley Fool may have formal recommendations for or against. Don't buy or sell investments based solely on what you hear. All personal finance content follows Motley Fool Editorial standards, and is not approved by advertisers. Advertisements are sponsored content and provided for informational purposes only. To see our full advertising disclosure, please check out our show notes. I'm Robert Brokamp. Fool on, everybody.

Charles Schwab is an advertising partner of Motley Fool Money. Robert Brokamp, CFP has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool recommends Charles Schwab and recommends the following options: short June 2026 $97.50 calls on Charles Schwab. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.