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What should I consider when selecting a broker/advisor to manage my IRA?
This is not a direct answer to your question, but you might want to consider whether you want to have a financial planner at all. Would a large mutual fund company or brokerage serve your needs better than a bank? You are still quite young and so have been contributing to IRAs for only a few years. Also, the wording in your question suggests that your IRA investments have not done spectacularly well, and so it is reasonable to infer that your IRA is not a large amount, or at least not as large as what it would be 30  years from now. At this level of investment, it would be difficult for you to find a financial planner who spends all that much time looking after your interests. That you should get away from your current planner, presumably a mid-level employee in what is typically called the trust division of the bank, is a given.  But, to go to another bank (or even to a different employee in the same bank), where  you will also likely be nudged towards investing your IRA in CDs, annuities, and a few mutual funds with substantial sales charges and  substantial annual expense fees, might just take you from the frying pan into the fire. You might want to consider transferring your IRA to a large mutual fund company and investing it in something simple  like one of their low-cost (meaning small annual expense ratio) index funds. The Couch Potato portfolio suggests equal amounts invested in a no-load S&P 500 Index fund and a no-load Bond Index fund, or a 75%-25% split favoring the stock index fund (in view of your age and the fact that the IRA should be a long-term investment).  But the point is,  you can open an IRA account, have the money transferred from your IRA account with the bank, and make the investments on-line all by yourself instead of having a financial advisor do it on your behalf and charge you a fee for doing so (not to mention possibly screwing it up.) You can set up Automated Investment too; the mutual fund company will gladly withdraw money from your checking account and invest it in whatever fund(s) you choose.  All this is not complicated at all.  If you would like to follow the Couch Potato strategy and rebalance your portfolio once a year, you can do it  by yourself too. If you want to invest in funds other than the S&P 500 Index fund, etc. most mutual fund  companies offer a "portfolio analysis" and advice for a fee (and the fee is usually waived when the assets increase above certain levels - varies from company to company).  You could thus have a portfolio analysis done each year, and hopefully it will be free after a few more years.  Indeed, at that level, you also typically get one person assigned as your advisor, just as you have with a bank. Once you get the recommendations, you can choose to follow them  or not, but you have control over how and where your IRA assets are invested.  Over the years, as your IRA assets grow, you can branch out into  investments other than "staid" index funds, but right now, having a financial planner for your IRA might not be worth it. Later, when you have more assets, by all means if you want to explore investing in specific stocks with a brokerage instead of sticking to mutual funds only but this might also mean phone calls urging you to sell Stock A right now, or buy hot Stock B today etc. So, one way of improving your interactions and have a better experience with your new financial planner is to not have a planner at all for a few years and do some of the work yourself.