RJ and Makay

Financial advisors' earnings declined 11% last year, indicates a new poll by the College for Financial Planning. Among 345 Certified Financial Planner (CFP) certificants and recent graduates of the College's CFP program, average annual earnings were $190,922 last year compared with $215,345 in 2009 and $195,349 in 2008. Residual effects of the recession were responsible for last year's decline, the College suggests.

Although they made less money last year, 94% of respondents said they're happy with their career choice. The poll also found respondents are:

A survey of 1,000 middle class Americans by First Command Financial Services has identified ten traits people look for in a financial planner. The top two, selected by about three-quarters of respondents in both cases, were “knowledgeable” and “trustworthy.” Seventy percent said their planner had to be "honest," making that number three on the list.

Here's the entire top 10 list:

When it comes to pricing, fee-based financial advisors simply aren't charging enough, suggest data from wealth management software firm PriceMetrix. The company drew this conclusion after analyzing 380 million transactions executed between 2007 and 2010 in 1 million fee-based accounts and 4 million transactional accounts.

“The most surprising thing to us was the wide range of prices charged for similar relationships on similar-sized fee-based accounts,” remarks PriceMetrix CEO Doug Trott. Fees progressively declined from an average of 1.17% on accounts ranging between $1 million and $2 million to 0.63% on accounts worth more than $5 million, Trott says. For accounts between $250,000 and $500,000, the lowest quartile of the advisors charged an average of 81 basis points while the highest quartile charged 208 basis points.