A financial planner is trained to deal with a very wide variety of circumstances. As a financial planner is required to keep current on a great many different products and investment categories, his advice can be tailored to suit the needs of anyone seeking income protection or wealth.

Many of a financial planner's clients are near retirement, and their task is to come up with a spending and investment plan to make sure that the worker's superannuation payout will last as long as the retiree's lifetime.

A growing number of clients are much younger, however. There has been great growth in the financial planning industry since it first started as a distinct profession, separating from insurance sales, stockbroking and accounting. Many clients are now seeking the services of a financial planner for investment advice in order to create wealth. The financial planner will assess each case individually and will identify areas of excessive risk (which may be managed with life, health or property insurance), help to suggest a moderate spending plan and chart a course of investments that should enjoy a reasonable hope of providing the returns sought by the client.

Financial planners are social security experts, and will let you know if you are entitled to any kind of payment or concession.

Financial planners also help set up family trusts and make sure that all client's have a legal will and have granted enduring power of attorney to spouses (which means that if you are in hospital plugged in to a life support machine your spouse can access any bank accounts etc not in joint names). Financial planners only identify problems in these specific areas though, they are not lawyers, and will either refer you to a lawyer or suggest buying one of those legal will kits from the post office if such a deficiency is noted.

If you are considering investing in shares or real estate, even if you intend to invest by yourself rather than through managed funds, it is always a good idea to seek a financial planner's advice as he can suggest suitable strategies to adopt, give professional opinions on the viability of the chosen investment, and help you invest in the most efficient and tax-advantaged way. A financial planner can be a very good buffer between you and a real estate agent or stockbroker as he will help you establish a more global view of investing, especially with regard to efficient diversification, and less biased opinions on suitability.

The hard part of a financial planner's job is not the investing bit, there are usually several funds that are doing quite well and a financial planner can guide you into those. The difficult bit is the legislative side of it. The Labor and Liberal parties have different agendas with superannuation, making a terrible mess when you look back at the number of changes that come into effect every year, but remaining in place since tax changes are seldom retrospective. Both sides of politics, and even more so the minor parties want Australian citizens to fund their own retirements, but are motivated by the same thing as most of their voters; an eerie, haunting fear that somehow "the rich" will gain benefit from some sort of tax break and become even more wealthy. The section of the tax act that deals with superannuation is the thickest tome of the lot. No other law has received this much attention in order to try to specify what can and cannot be achieved by super, and how this may be done.

The result is a complex battery of laws that come into effect under a wide variety of circumstances, with different regimes all working simultaneously in accordance with the legislation at the time you deposited funds in your super. The situation is a very tangled mess of red tape, involving different tax rates and cutoffs, a ceiling called the reasonable benefits limit that imposes a number on how much money you can save up before they start to slug you with taxes at the highest marginal rate and a hodgepodge of measures that are all designed to close down "loopholes" in the previous incarnation of the act. (NB, a definition may be in order: a "loophole" is any tax deduction that does not meet with the approval of the special interest group that funded your reelection).

If you have your super paid out of your pre-tax salary you can save tax money but taxes are levied later on your super. Paying from after-tax income is inefficient in the short term but isn't taxed later on. Franked dividends may or may not be a good thing at various times depending on the situation you are in. How you administer your savings plan can have powerful repercussions on social security benefits should you lose your job and be on welfare for a while, or retire early.

What is worse is that no matter how hard you try to study the present regulatory regime and get to the point where finally you "get it", a new government or an initiative by a standing one when they get spooked by a poll result will always change everything. Why should you see a financial planner? If you are an excellent stock picker, and do all your own investing and always beat the market, if you have the perfect financial setup that minimises non-deductible loans and minimises your tax burden from investments, if you know your insurance cover is just fine and you don't see the point of someone just checking it out for you, if your estate is in order and you got all that sorted out a while ago - then your whole financial situation is probably already moving toward becoming obsolete because some politician has other ideas. Financial planners and accountants get all the latest tax info sent to them in their professional journals, they are subscribed to info services to ensure compliance and are required to undergo regular training as well as attend seminars all the time. Tax lawyers do the same thing but will probably charge more for a consultation. If you are really serious about making everything work for you in the most effective way possible, you should see a professional adviser of some sort. If you see a financial planner, an accountant or a tax lawyer it probably doesn't matter much, but generally speaking it is beyond the means of even a very interested and active layperson to get it all right all the time.