Finding an Advisor

Before we get into a few wake-up questions for you, and for any advisor you may be thinking about hiring, let me remind you of your own behavior.
Most people lack the discipline to put together a sensible portfolio. Not the intelligence, the discipline. And they lack the discipline to stick with it. In a prior post, I went through where we go off course. Suffice it to say here, most of you will divert from the selected path, fail to rebalance your portfolio, and get mightily distracted with daily life.
All of the above are reasons you need a keeper, an advisor, a minder. A good one will prevent stupidity. A good one. The number of good ones is maybe ten percent of the available population, the next ten percent are okay, 80% are in it for fees and commissions, good luck to you.
Test questions:
Don't bother to ask for his/her track record. Different clients have different portfolios, yours may resemble someone else's but so what? Past performance is no guarantee of future results. Read the prior sentence frequently, and every time someone pulls out a track record, repeat it until they either put the track record back in the drawer, or you see they don't get it. That means you should leave and keep searching.
If they recommend any 'house' mutual fund or manager, leave.
Ask if they plan to buy individual stocks for you.
If they say 'yes,' leave.
Ask if they plan to buy mutual funds with any form of sales charge, front-end, back-end, never end, and they say 'yes'....leave. (Warning, they will likely say 'yes, but,' if so, you should definitely leave.)
Ask how they are compensated, and keep asking until you are clear.
Then ask what additional charges apply in your case. Everything. Let me repeat, everything. You are looking for transaction fees, mailing costs, yes, they charge you to send you trade confirmations. If they offer a mutual fund, what does the fund manager make, what are the administrative costs, and ask them to point to the page that outlines every possible charge. Bear in mind, the mutual fund has trading costs.
So ask about portfolio turnover in the fund. If it's twice a year, that means the advisor is talking a long term plan, but the manager of the mutual fund, which has you money, is swapping out the entire portfolio every six months. So the 'long term' talk is just that, talk.
There are various measures of turnover, I'll get into those shortly.
There's more, but this is enough to digest for now.