Lucky for us, Branham, a certified financial planner with Cornerstone Wealth Advisors in Edina, Minn., will now have a larger role in shaping the future of financial planning at a time of great need. He was recently nominated to the Financial Planning Association's board of directors. He also was one of six advisers nationwide labeled a "Mover and Shaker" by Financial Planning Magazine.

"When they called and told me, I asked if they had the right number, the right person," said the ever-so-modest Branham. The group's members were chosen for their "powerful ideas for embracing and mastering change," according to the article.

After a year filled with financial fraud, bank failures and a Wall Street that put itself before Main Street, change is overdue. So I sat down with Branham to discuss his version of financial planning 2.0.

Q. What are your clients' greatest fears in this market?

A. That this is something completely different and the market's never going to recover. We hear that day after day after day. I think part of it is because the market fell so fast and the information that's available today is all negative. You can't escape it. That scares them.

Q. What is your greatest fear in this market?

A. That clients listen to their own fears and try to time the market. What clients don't realize is the markets will rebound before things feel better; they're forward-thinking. So if you wait until things feel better and the good news is coming out, you'll have missed some portion of that market comeback.

Q. Are you rethinking risk and asset allocation after 2008?

A. The reality is that there was no port in this storm. When people say, "I saw this coming and moved to cash," they got lucky. There was nowhere to go to avoid this economy calamity - foreign stocks, domestic stocks, commodities - they all got hammered in the last 12 months.

The one place you could have built that cushion was in fixed-income (bonds), and that would have made a huge difference on returns. Do we dedicate a higher percentage to those types of things in the future? Also, we might have 20 to 30 percent of their assets in cash that won't be subject to market failure because we know if the market tanks like it did in 2008, we'd have at least that amount of money to get us through while that market comes back. What we might be finding out now is that the cushion should last seven to 10 years. I think those are the real questions we're going to answer over the next year or two.

Q. Tell me about your first job in the industry.

A. I worked at Waddell & Reed (Financial Advisors) for two years, but it wasn't the right fit. It became clear that we were getting training based on what that division manager was going to get bonused on. So if the goal was to sell more insurance products, we would get a lot of insurance training in the quarter. There were just some things I didn't like about the "your income depends on what you sell" kind of model. I always thought there was a different way to do it, where I could work with people without so many conflicts of interest. And I found the fee-only model that Cornerstone uses.

Q. How does the financial planning industry need to change to better serve clients?

A. There needs to be a uniform standard of care. I'm a big believer in a fiduciary standard so clients' interests are put ahead of those who are selling products or giving advice. If you have people out there who aren't bound by that moral and ethical standard, that's where you really get the predatory stuff. We need to start putting people's best interests before our own, and I think that will go a long way.

Also, if you have a 401(k), you might have four or five or six options available to you. But the reality is you really are not able to diversify. Companies are really limiting people in scope and availability. Maybe we need to improve the options a little bit in 401(k)s and investment accounts to provide more choice. Choices are limited in international equity funds, domestic small cap fund and to some degree fixed-income funds. And there are no commodity choices and real estate choices typically.

Q. Do you think financial fraud a la Bernie Madoff, trouble on Wall Street, and severe stock market losses have damaged the trust Americans have in financial professionals?

A. Who can blame the public for being angry right now, and who can blame them for generalizing? One of the big things we have to do as planners is rebuild that trust with the public that we're not all Bernie Madoff and that we didn't all buy collateralized debt obligations and we didn't all participate in subprime lending.

It's our job to sit down with clients and have those conversations, to talk about what happened in the past and what the future might look like. If clients sit and let their fears and questions fester, they'll never know and it will always be in the back of their minds.

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(Kara McGuire writes about personal finance. Write to her at kara@startribune.com or at the Star Tribune, 425 Portland Ave., Minneapolis, MN 55488.)

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