What Is a Certified Financial Planner (CFP)?

By Kristi Waterworth – Updated Jun 25, 2025 at 4:52 PM | Fact-checked by Frank Bass

Key Points

CFPs create customized financial plans and offer broad services such as estate and retirement planning.
Choosing a CFP ensures you'll get an expert with a rigorous certification and ethical commitment.
CFPs have legal, ethical, and fiduciary duties to prioritize client interests.

When you're trying to deal with increasingly complicated financial matters, it's important to understand just who to call in to do the hard jobs. One of the many people you may need in your life is a certified financial planner (CFP). Read on to learn more about this specific financial profession.

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A couple works with their financial advisor. — Image source: Getty Images.

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Their fiduciaries can be broken down into three specific areas:

The duty of loyalty. Loyalty means prioritizing their clients' interests, including protecting their secrets and personal information whenever possible and legally permissible.
The duty of care. All good CFPs automatically follow the duty of care by simply behaving in a competent and diligent manner. They're detail-oriented and make sure all the i's are dotted and the t's are crossed.
The duty of compliance. Compliance in this case is about adhering to clients' reasonable and lawful requests. This can sometimes come into conflict with loyalty because clients may not always know what's best for them, but believe they do.

These fiduciary duties only apply to CFPs, not noncertified financial planners. So, if you're looking for someone to help with your estate or education planning, make sure you know you've hired the right professional. Although noncertified financial planners can be reliable professionals, CFPs have gone above and beyond to prove their competency by becoming licensed and committing to maintaining that license.

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About the Author

Kristi Waterworth has been a contributing real estate and financial expert at The Motley Fool, covering real estate, investing, and personal finance topics, since 2020. Kristi has been interviewed by various TV media outlets and podcasts for her real estate investing expertise – from residential real estate to digital real estate and everything in between. Kristi’s journalist career spans over 25 years, and she has written about real estate investing, homeownership, and home construction specifically for the last decade. She was also previously a licensed Realtor and general building contractor before the Great Recession and housing market collapse. She holds a bachelor’s degree in American history from Columbia College in Missouri.

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