Have you ever wondered what the random alphabet soup of letters is after some financial

advisors' names?

Well, I'm about to break them all down in this, the 15th episode of the Retirement Planning

Education Podcast.

Welcome to the Retirement Planning Education Podcast, where you can learn all about

IRAs and Roth IRAs, employer retirement plans, taxes, social

security, Medicare, portfolio withdrawal strategies, annuities, estate planning, and much more.

And now here's your host, Andy Panko.

Welcome, everybody. Thank you for listening, as always. We got another fun one today. This one's

also a little different than the typical

retirement planning focus content that I often do. Today, I want to discuss and explain a lot of the

seemingly random letters you'll often see after many financial advisors' names. These letters denote voluntary professional designations

that the advisor has chosen to get. In most, if not all cases, these things aren't required.

They're not licenses. They're not any specific regulatory requirement per se. It's really just a voluntary designation that the advisor

chose to get to demonstrate he or she has some sort of additional level of knowledge or testing

or background in a certain topic or topics. So it's not retirement specific, but I will mention

some designations that are retirement specific, but these letters in

general aren't specific to retirement. The reason why I'm bringing it up is a lot of people in or near

retirement are often in a prime position to want or need financial assistance from an advisor.

So often retirees will come across advisors and you'll

likely see a bunch of letters after their names. So hopefully this episode will help make sense of that.

And special shout out to Kevin Liles who recommended this topic to me. And thankfully did. I think

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