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Do You Pass the Trust Muster? Says Who? Announcing Background Checks for Health Advocates
We were all there at one time; that point in early adulthood when we realized we needed someone to guide us as we saved money for our futures and retirement. We didn’t understand much (if anything at all) about investing, or 401Ks or IRAs or REITs or annuities. We were confused. We thought we would miss something important. We needed an expert – an investment advisor! Someone who truly understood all this investing and saving stuff, terminology, possibilities, to help make it happen…. Someone who could hold our hands over time as needed…. Someone we could trust with our money. Someone we would trust to hold our futures in their hands. A VERY tall order! So how did we find that right person? We asked friends and others we trusted if they could recommend someone. We might have interviewed a few advisors. These days, many people go to the Internet to try to figure it out. But most of us didn’t have that tool when we started saving, so we relied on recommendations, and sometimes on credentials they had earned, or bonds they held. For most of us it probably worked out just fine. If the first one or two didn’t work out as we liked, we had the liberty of making a change. Many variables including our working track records, our ability to set money aside, and the knowledge and abilities of that person we eventually trusted to recommend investments have affected our savings as time has gone on. For most of us, it remains to be seen whether we made the right choices for the long haul. But clearly – our entire financial futures have been predicated on our abilities to find the right person to TRUST with our money. Here we shift gears to something equally as important: our health and physical well-being futures. In the “old days” (15 and more years ago) we could pretty much rely on our doctors and their support systems to look out for our health and well-being, to treat and cure us when we got sick or hurt, and to elicit…