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From out of my yellow pages, I picked a reputable-sounding name: M. H. Senzel & Co. I called up and made an appointment for the free introductory consultation. M. H. Senzel occupied a seventh-floor suite in a large concrete building near a freeway in my town. The waiting room was right out of a doctor's office, except that instead of Newsweek or People on the coffee table there was a Money and a Forbes. I sat a few minutes reading the Money until an earnest young fellow in a sport coat and leisure slacks appeared. He introduced himself as Boyd Leffert.

Mr. Leffert led me through a hallway into a conference room and motioned me to sit in a chair midway down a long table. He set up a vinyl display board that had been leaning against a wall and picked up a felt-tipped pointer from the table. He stood by the display board and drew things on it with the pointer as we chatted.

The first thing Mr. Leffert wanted to talk about was the "universe of financial planners," which now includes more than 200,000 in this country alone. Apparently, there are twice as many of these experts as there were a decade ago, which is what Mr. Leffert was getting at. It's very easy to call yourself a financial planner. In fact, any out-of-work diesel mechanic or laid-off saxophone player can become one by putting up a shingle to that effect. The 10,000 stockbrokers at Merrill Lynch have renamed themselves financial consultants and have received new business cards, while the stockbrokers at Shearson Lehman refer to themselves as financial consultants as well.

A dilemma for the client, Mr. Leffert recognized, is finding a planner who knows what he's about. The hard part is that there's no simple measure of success and no agreement as to what good planning really entails. In other fields where it's difficult to distinguish success from failure-such as in government bureaucracy, academia, or European aristocracy-titles and certifications abound. This is also true in financial planning.

Mr. Leffert said there are certified financial planners and registered financial planners, plus several gradations of consultants. He named various organizations to which planners belong-including the International Association for Financial Planning (IAFP)-and the various tests that planners may take, including the CFP given by the College of Financial Planning and the ChFC, which is an offshoot of something called the CLU.

Mr. Leffert guessed that of all the planners only a thousand or so had an adequate foundation and less than half that number were "extremely well qualified." Though he admitted there's no agreement on this, he suggested that to be absolutely safe the client should look for a firm that covers as many bases as possible, and whose employees are connected to the CFP, have passed their ChFC, and are registered with the IAFP as well. Happily, this was the case with his own firm, M. H. Senzel. Personally, Mr. Leffert was both a certified and a registered financial planner, CFP and RFP.

After describing the financial universe, Mr. Leffert began to explain some of the things financial planning could do for me. The most important was to "help clarify my financial objectives." I thought these were pretty clear already, especially after those nights I'd spent watching late-night television. "I want to get rich. That's my objective," I told Mr. Leffert. He laughed, as if this were a joke! When I didn't laugh back, he got a disturbed look on his face and subsequently took on a more patronizing attitude toward my case.

If you visit a financial planner, I'd advise you not to mention that getting rich is one or your objectives. They seem to have a taboo against this. Mr. Leffert, at least, seemed more interested in helping me move around what I already had than in helping me get more of it.

What Mr. Leffert wanted to hear instead was whether I'd prepared for reasonable long-term growth, stability, security, the mortgage payments, the children's college education, and whether I was properly annuitized, and so forth.

To explain how I might better clarify my objectives, Mr. Leffert turned to his blackboard and gave a 15-minute lecture, complete with diagrams he drew with the felt-tip pen. It had to do with putting a coordinating umbrella over the chaos of my life, which he'd divided into asset management, tax planning, estate planning, insurance planning, and retirement planning. As he talked about the retirement planning, he drew a little happy face of a grandpa with a beard.

Between you and me, I was thinking about my actual household of bounced checks, forgotten payments, untold dollars in unpaid parking tickets, the silly monthly budgets that we'd tried and then abandoned, the thousands of dollars of incidental expenses, and wondered what possible relation it all had to the pie graph that Mr. Leffert had so carefully devised. I blurted out that I had no life insurance. This was as much a shock to Mr. Leffert as if I'd admitted to wearing my wife's brassiere. I told him I didn't know our annual income, since with me being a free-lance writer and my wife a real estate agent, income is always unpredictable. Finally I confessed that my life had nothing to do with the "totally integrated whole" that he had created with his felt-tip.

He sat down, leaned over, and in a fatherly tone advised me not to worry, that all people in need of financial planning believe their situation to be hopeless. He said he suspected that however sloppy my family finances, I was a redeemable case. He handed me a brochure published by his company, opened it to an inside page, and showed me the part that said: "Very few people whom we have met have this vital total and continuing perspective on their financial life."

Mr. Leffert soon got to the hard part. Before we could even think about a plan, there would have to be a "basic data gathering of from two to twenty hours," during which his staff would pore over my family's grocery bills, receipts, and so forth and "take a picture." After that the data gatherers would come back to the office and play the "what-if game" among themselves, moving around our debits and credits, speculating what might happen if, for instance, we bought life insurance, transferred some assets to the children, or put more savings into Treasury bills. He called the what-if game "intermediation."

I volunteered to stop paying the gardener and start mowing the lawn myself, but Mr. Leffert said don't be silly, that was premature and too simplistic. It sounded as if M. H. Senzel & Co. would apply as many calculations to our household accounts as routinely go into the budgeting of major corporations. Even after our plan was completed, we'd have to come in twice a year for checkups, just like at the dentist. Mr. Leffert said that putting us on this review schedule was essential, or else the entire effort might be wasted.

So far, there'd been no mention of the cost of all this. Mr. Leffert seemed to be saving that information for last. When I asked him about the fee, he delved a bit further into the importance of the review schedule, the "totally integrated whole," and the expert perspective. He tried to smooth the path with references to "time," "effort," and "a lot of things the client doesn't see happening." Finally, he admitted that the fee for an initial plan could vary from 2 to 4 percent of our total family assets-depending on how much we had to begin with. After that, the firm would charge 1 to 2 percent per year for the follow-ups and the checkups.

His reminder that this was tax-deductible was only slightly reassuring. Being careful not to say anything about getting rich, I wondered out loud if the plan might at least provide us with enough extra income to cover the cost of planning. Mr. Leffert was certain the plan would save us money, but how that might be invested depended on our money manager. Here was another professional that we'd need.

The firm had its own money managers who were part of the bargain, but Mr. Leffert said I'd be free to go out and choose my own. He cautioned that it's as hard to find a good money manager as it is to find a good financial planner, so I'd have to do a lot of research into performance, fees, and the like before I could make an intelligent choice. Probably I'd be better off working with the professionals in-house.

Beyond the financial planner and the money manager, I'd need a brokerage house to make the investments. Mr. Leffert said his firm worked closely with a discount broker that offered very competitive rates. As for an accountant, he said I could continue to use the one I had, or else I could employ one from M. H. Senzel.

That more or less ended our free introductory consultation. Mr. Leffert gave me a set of contracts to review and invited me to get back to him when I was ready for the data-gathering, but I never did. The prospect of having to pay the original planning fee, plus the cost of semiannual checkups-not to mention the money manager, the stockbroker, and possibly the accountant-was worrisome. I doubted there would be much money left to manage. As capable and as thoughtful as Mr. Leffert had been, I decided to move along without the benefit of his firm's considerable professionalism. Maybe I can save you the same trouble with this Fourth Useful Tip:

Financial security is too expensive for the average investor

This article is excerpted from 'A Fool and His Money - The Odyssey of an Average Investor' by John Rothchild.