Do you feel too poor to get financial advice? Here's how to find 'free' help - even if you don't have $1 million-plus.

By Beth Pinsker

The people who need financial help the most often feel like they can't afford it

Sam Petrucci is a financial planner who specializes in complex tax issues, and most of his clients are wealthy - not just a little wealthy, but very, very wealthy.

Like most professionals with a specialty, though, he has friends who angle for a little free advice even though they are not at the wealth level of his clients. One called recently because she had several thousand dollars in cash from a windfall and wanted to figure out how to draw more than the 4.5% interest it was getting at the bank.

When it comes to financial advice, some things are universal. The person with $3,000 needs to think about things in the same way as somebody with $300,000 or $30 million. "The questions are the same: What is my asset allocation? How do I create a portfolio? Do I need to be mindful of taxes?" said Petrucci, who is head of advice, planning and fiduciary services for Neuberger Berman in New York. "The person with less might not not have the tax-, trust- or estate-planning needs, but nevertheless they want to know how to think about their future. For any financial plan, the universal question is: Do I have enough money to retire? That's the $1 million question for Americans."

The person with $30 million can pay for financial advice, and might fork over a 1% fee for white-glove service, which could amount to a whopping $300,000 a year or so.

The person with $300,000 would pay about $3,000 a year at that rate, but that is too much for the person paying - and too little for the professional giving advice.

And the person with $3,000 is definitely on their own.

If you're lucky enough to have a friend like Petrucci to call, you may get a little guidance for free, even if you don't have millions. He steered his pal toward some low-cost ETFs, and gave her the confidence of having a sounding board.

But what about the rest of us?

Here are the ways to get the advice and guidance you need for free - or at least a much lower cost than a 1% fee that would eat into your returns.

Work your sources

The best place to start is where you have your accounts. "All financial firms can provide guidance to you. There's no minimum; if you go online to any wealth-management firm, you can set up a meeting," said Beth Lawlor, president of private and affluent wealth management at U.S. Bank.

This is kind of like the urgent-care approach to financial help - you don't get an ongoing relationship with a professional and your quality level may vary, but you will be able to get some simple answers from somebody who can see your account information. Your experience is likely to be better at a full-service brokerage firm than a bank, because your representative is more likely to be a certified financial planner or other fiduciary who is tasked with putting your best interests first.

Also be aware that you're still going to run into the 1% conundrum at your financial institution if you want to ask more than a few simple questions, because the higher service-level tiers do charge fees. That relationship still has to make financial sense to both the client and the provider; Lawlor said the sweet spot for her firm is $100,000 in assets, with the potential to add much more down the road.

If you work for a company that has a 401(k) plan, that will likely come with offers every now and then to have a half-hour private consultation with a financial adviser, or something comparable. This is actually better than just calling your bank, because these representatives are likely to have more training and are acting as fiduciaries on behalf of the employee retirement plan. Some will only answer retirement-related questions, though.

No matter what, always approach any free services with a healthy dose of skepticism, because there's usually an upsell involved. "If something is free, you're the product," cautions certified financial planner and educator Cody Garrett, who is a proponent of transparency in the financial-planning industry.

Not all of the representatives you encounter will have your best interests at heart, and instead could be angling for commissions. This especially goes for the major banks, insurance companies and unlicensed tax preparers who call themselves financial advisers.

Seek out answers piecemeal

To stick with a truly DIY approach, you can cobble together a great deal of information based on what's publicly available. The internet is a great place to start, and much financial information is geared toward answering the most popular Google searches (including our own, like this video series).

To kick it up a notch from there, you can read some basic personal-finance books. Ramit Sethi's "I Will Teach You to Be Rich" is one that strongly argues against paying a recurring fee for financial help and instead advocates doing it on your own, but there are plenty of others - like Benjamin Graham's "The Intelligent Investor" (a famous favorite of Warren Buffett's) or Helaine Olen's "The Index Card."

The key to using general advice is to know how to apply it to your own situation. It can be frustrating, because the most common answer to any personal-finance question is "it depends" and the only way to truly know the answer is to look at your numbers.

That's why the most useful DIY sources for you will be calculators - either free ones or those that charge fees, like newretirement.com. At some point in the process, you need to feed your real data into tools and do projections deep into the future.

You may want to run all sorts of numbers depending on your financial situation - from how much to save for college or a home down payment, to whether you should take Social Security at 62 or wait for your maximum benefit at 70. That's mostly what a paid financial adviser is going to do for you anyway; they just have access to sophisticated software designed for that purpose and can run thousands of scenarios.

Put it all together in a written plan

If you went to a financial planner, what they'd do is walk you through a series of questions to determine your financial goals and then crunch your numbers. The end result would be a written report outlining your current status and projecting your future, with steps to get from Point A to Point Z. So to really do what the pros do, you'll take everything you've done to educate yourself, run your own numbers in the previous steps and then write it down. This takes those vague notions rolling around your brain and makes them concrete and actionable.

Your plan doesn't have to be anything more than a simple text document, but it should lay out on paper your assets and liabilities and the steps you want to take in the future. Your projections can be as simple as: I have $1,000 in savings now, I will save $50 a month going forward in a high-yield savings account (at XYZ bank, account number 123456) and, in 10 years, I should have between $8,000 and $9,000 saved for an emergency fund, depending on interest rates.

If you get this far and you still need help, you can also hire a fee-only financial planner for a limited engagement to set you up, and then you can take it from there. For these planners, search through the National Association of Personal Finance Advisors (NAPFA) or a service like Nectarine. You'll pay hourly, in the neighborhood of $150 to $400 an hour, but it won't be forever.

Taking this kind of holistic look at every money aspect of your life and documenting it is really what financial planning is about - not just deciding what ETFs or mutual funds should you pick. Often, investment allocation is the easiest part of the process and the one that you can most trust software to do. Garrett thinks that most financial institutions turn this process inside out, however, and offer free financial planning as a marketing element to get you to pay for ongoing investment management on that 1%-fee plan.

"For somebody to give you investment advice in your best interest, they first have to understand your interest," Garrett adds. When it comes to your financial plan, there's perhaps nobody who understands your interests better than you do, so that may be all you need to set down your financial plan in writing.

April is National Financial Literacy Month. To mark the occasion, MarketWatch will publish a series of "Financial Fitness" articles to help readers improve their fiscal health, and offer advice on how to save, invest and spend their money wisely. Read more here.

More Financial Literacy

Financial Literacy Month is about more than saving or budgeting. It's about taking stock of your life.Progress, not perfection: Gen Z has made some extraordinary financial moves but still needs help'It's easy to hide things from ourselves': How a budget can keep you honest and focused on your goals

-Beth Pinsker

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