Professional Designations for Advisors

By Brent Meyer — SafeMoney.com Founder & Editor Reviewed by Licensed Financial Professionals  |  SafeMoney.com — Trusted Since 2011  |  Updated Regularly Quick Answer: Discover essential professional designations for financial advisors. Enhance your retirement planning with trusted expertise. Learn more at SafeMoney.com. If you are looking for someone to help you with preparing for retirement , you might have come across financial professionals with alphabet soup after their name. What those letters generally represent are professional designations. These designations are programs in which an advisor has completed certain studies and exams in order to have professional recognition of their expertise in a certain field. For example, some designations for financial advisors cover retirement income planning . Other designations deal with high-level knowledge and planning concepts around life insurance products. Then some designation programs recognize an advisor for high-level knowledge of overall concepts, such as around investments, retirement, taxes, financial planning, insurance, risk management, and estate planning. How Can Professional Designations Help with Hiring an Advisor? If you are looking for a financial professional to help with your situation, then these professional designations can be a nice clue-in of what expertise that someone brings to the table. These letters denote professional credibility and also a code of ethics in most cases.   On the other hand, many highly experienced and competent financial professionals don’t necessarily carry this sort of recognition. How do you distinguish them, then? Check out what to keep in mind when hiring an advisor , if you are seeking out the right guide for your financial needs. All of this said, there are many professional financial designations. Sometimes it’s hard to discern which credentials really mean something and which ones don’t. Let’s go over some of the professional designations for financial advisors that deal with retirement and life insurance products, since those are tied to contractually guaranteed strategies covered on this site. Here’s a breakdown of the major financial designations and the requirements for them. Chartered Life Underwriter ® (CLU®) Designation This designation is the oldest professional credential in the financial industry. It was first introduced in 1927. Over 106,000 insurance professionals have earned this credential s