(FORTUNE Magazine) – Once, you could retire with a garden hoe or a stack of novels and tell your ex-employer and Social Security where to mail your checks. Not anymore. Personal finance has gotten so complicated that no one can hope to prepare for retirement without employing a large and rather expensive advisory team. Says Roy Ballentine, a consultant who assembles such teams: "We long ago concluded you'll never find a single expert with all the answers."

Chances are you already have a money manager or a broker stocking your portfolio, and you've hired an accountant to keep score. Maybe you're already playing You Bet Your Life with an insurance agent. Once you build up your assets, you'll be talking to a lawyer about how to scatter them along with your ashes. Sometimes you need an expert you didn't know you needed, as I recently discovered.

I'm an early boomer, 51, with the usual smattering of assets and two file cabinets full of financial paperwork. My accountant does a fine job with the taxes, throwing out my imaginative deductions to create harmony with the IRS. But he's not a pension expert, so it didn't occur to him to recommend a defined-benefit plan that allows a self-employed writer like me to shelter more income. I stumbled onto that strategy in a magazine, then hired a defined-benefit specialist to draw up the papers.

Financial teams are often built in this accidental fashion. The friendly neighborhood agent who sold you auto and home insurance becomes your life insurance adviser. The law firm that won you a settlement in the case against the neighbor's dog handles your trusts, your will, and your estate. Your investment counselor is the broker who put you into Wal-Mart 15 years ago. Soon enough, you've assembled a lineup of familiar faces, none of whom has any particular expertise in the tax strategies, insurance strategies, or investment strategies that will maximize your return in old age.

"Start early and build long-term relationships" is the most common bit of advice on recruiting a money team. This is the financial version of "don't wait until your pipes spring a leak to hire the plumber," but in finance, a long-term relationship may be shortsighted. The expert who helps you design a retirement plan when you're 40 may not be around to give you advice on how to take the money out when you're 65. By then he's probably retired and living off his own retirement fund. On the other hand, if you wait until you turn 60 to design a retirement plan, you won't have time to fund it.

Even if our ad hoc collection of experts is qualified, without a team leader to provide guidance and strategy, the members are likely to work in isolation and sometimes at cross purposes. This is where the U.S. health care system, for all its faults, is superior to the wealth care system. Medicine is a far more complicated subject than money, which is why it takes six years to become a full doctor and six months to become a stockbroker. Yet to the average person, having money has become more confusing than being sick. That's because people who get sick have a family doctor--usually a general practitioner or internist--to lead them to the right specialists and explain the various procedures. When it comes to money, however, there's been no obvious GP of finance.

Earlier in the century, the banker seemed the logical choice for financial GP, but thanks to the Glass-Steagall Act, banks weren't allowed to sell stocks, bonds, or mutual funds to the general public. This cut them off from key areas of investing and limited their role as coordinators. Anyway, bankers never gained the public confidence the way doctors did. Too many banks went bankrupt.

More recently the financial planner has emerged as the most likely candidate to play the family-doctor role. At present, this profession claims about 300,000 practitioners in the U.S., but just because they hang shingles over their doorways and buy ads in the yellow pages doesn't mean they're qualified. Financial planning snuck up on the regulators before they got around to setting up a nationwide licensing and rating system. You'd think this important profession would require as much training as, say, accountancy or law, but so far it doesn't. In some states, licensed driver is a more impressive title than financial planner. The driver has to pass a test, but the planner sends in a fee and fills out a couple of forms.

Finding a qualified financial planner is not as hopeless as it sounds. Of the 300,000 people who claim this expertise, about 10% have a designation that means something. These are the certified financial planners, who must complete 24 months of study and have up to five years of practical experience before obtaining their title.

You can get a list of qualified planners in your area by calling 800-282-PLAN. To find out whether a planner is certified on the one hand or has been publicly censured for misconduct on the other, call 888-CFP MARK. Or, on your first visit, you can ask a planner to show you a copy of Form ADV, in which he is supposed to reveal any black marks, describe his qualifications, and tell how much he charges for his services.

Planners make a living on commissions, fees, or both. Everything else being equal, pick a fee-only planner, because those who earn commissions on the investments or strategies they recommend may be swayed by the potential payoff. This is the same sort of conflict of interest that can exist in brokerage houses.

If you connect with a good financial planner before you hire the rest of the team, you may be able to save yourself some bother and some money. In the GP role, the planner might talk you out of buying life insurance you don't need or an annuity that is a poor substitute for a 401(k) plan. And whenever you do need another specialist, the planner may be able to help you choose a good one. This is a job that most of us try, and often fail, to accomplish ourselves.

Most how-to articles on this subject suffer from an overdose of optimism: Do research and ask a few questions and you're bound to find capable and honest planners, brokers, and accountants. This ignores the fact that few people besides Bob Woodward have the time or the energy to run background checks on their housekeepers and babysitters, much less their financial team.

Roy Ballentine offers this suggestion: "Look at education, professional affiliation, and the type of firm a person belongs to. You can also ask for references, but we don't put a lot of stock in that. These days people are gun-shy and afraid to say anything bad about anybody. Also, when was the last time you called a reference who said something critical about the person who provided the name?"

If you have the luxury of shopping around, another useful technique is to ask a variety of experts for a review of your financial setup to date. Most likely they'll provide the review for free. This will accomplish two things. You'll get a second opinion on the current status of your portfolio, trusts, and plans, and you'll learn something about the expert that will help you decide whether to put him or her on the team.

What follows is a quick rundown on things to look for and avoid with various types of advisers.

--The accountant. If you're like many retirees, you'll get involved in some kind of part-time business, consulting maybe. In that case you'll need a good tax-return person who knows something about freelance deductions. Or you may be able to get two experts in one by hiring one of the 8,000 certified public accountants who specialize in planning. Among them is an elite group of 1,600 personal financial specialists, each of whom passed a comprehensive test in planning and logged 750 hours of hands-on experience with real-life clients. For a list of personal financial specialists in your area, call the American Institute of CPAs at 800-862-4272 and hit No. 5 on the voice menu.

--The broker. There's no monopoly on bad advice anywhere on Wall Street, but the most useful broker is one who tempers enthusiasm with experience. Seasoned brokers know a great deal, but not about everything, so if you take advice from a broker, take it from one who is knowledgeable about your kind of investing. It doesn't do much good to sign on with a utilities expert when you plan to traffic in aggressive-growth mutual funds.

Beware the know-it-all who claims expertise in mutual funds, annuities, small stocks, large stocks, foreign stocks, and financial planning. Merrill Lynch calls its brokers "financial consultants," but this doesn't mean they are qualified to play the role of team leader.

Also beware the greenhorn broker. Eight months ago he might have been working in a shoe store, so why should you listen to him, unless he's recommending a shoe company?

It never hurts to do some investigating before signing on with a broker or a firm. You can do your own homework with the help of the National Council for Individual Investors, at 800-663-8516. For $5 the outfit will send you its annual survey, which rates 40 of the main brokerage firms on such things as commissions and disciplinary history. The survey also gives the specialties of the different firms, which should enable you to identify those that do the sort of investing you're interested in--technology, say, or blue chips. As Nancy Smith, director of the SEC's office of investor education, points out, "It's a good idea to look for somebody in your area. Usually you want to get to know them and have a face-to-face relationship."

--The money manager. There is no shortage of excellent independent money managers, and most are honest as well as capable. The odds of your money manager going bonkers and running off to Brazil with your assets in his briefcase are quite slim, but it does happen--and this is an extra risk often overlooked. If your broker at Smith Barney absconds with the funds, Smith Barney's insurance policy will cover the loss. No such coverage exists for an account with an independent money manager.

--The trust and estate lawyer. Did you know that lawyers are given ratings, just like bonds? A company called Martindale-Hubbell sends out surveys in which thousands of lawyers grade other lawyers A, B, or C. The results are published in the Martindale-Hubbell Law Directory, found in most libraries. All three ratings are positive; imagine the lawsuits if they weren't! "C" stands for "fair to high" legal ability, "B" for high to very high, and "A" for very high to preeminent. This is all highly subjective, but if you're looking for a lawyer for your team, the A list isn't a bad place to start.

The company also gives a "V" for honesty, but everybody who gets a rating of A, B, or C gets a "V" automatically, so it doesn't really mean much.

The problem is, even an A-rated lawyer can be a whiz at personal-injury lawsuits, real estate closings, and wills, but a dunce at trusts and estates. It takes an estate specialist to keep up with the frequent changes in the statutes.

A good place to look for legal advice on estate planning is the American College of Trust and Estate Counsel. This organization keeps a list of 2,700 member attorneys, with at least ten years' experience in trust and estate work--all of them recognized by their peers as topnotch. To get the names for your area, write the American College at 3415 South Sepulveda Boulevard, Suite 330, Los Angeles 90034.

--Retirement plan adviser. When Keoghs, IRAs, 401(k)s, and other such plans were introduced, the idea sounded simple: Put in the money, let it multiply tax-deferred, then retrieve it at retirement, when you're in a lower tax bracket. But it turns out there are many types of plans and many wrinkles within each, and the rules are ever changing and devilishly complex.

Some people use a pension adviser to handle the paperwork for their retirement plans. This works okay if the plans are the simple, boilerplate variety, but it may not work with plans that are unusual or complex. In that case, the pension expert might not be up to the task of modifying the plan a step ahead of the bureaucrats who change the rules. Iris Roth, my current defined-benefit adviser, thinks an individual can get better service from a boutique firm that specializes in retirement plans, as opposed to a full-service money management firm, in which individual cases are often handled by clerks and not the top strategists.

--Insurance agent. Here's a refrain I've heard from a chorus of insurance experts: Avoid buying policies from part-time sales reps. These are the schoolteachers, bus drivers, etc., who supplement their incomes by moonlighting as insurance salesmen. Your chances of getting informed advice are much greater with a full-time practitioner. Like many things, insurance is not something that can be mastered as a hobby.

The basic certification for an insurance agent is chartered life underwriter (CLU), a title held by roughly 30% of the agent population in the U.S. Many insurance agents are also certified as chartered financial consultants, which means they've passed the same test as many financial planners.

Every state has an insurance commissioner's office where you can find out whether complaints have been lodged against a particular agent, but these databases are far from infallible. Before you choose any insurance experts for your team, find out how much training they have had and whether they continue to take insurance courses.

A comprehensive financial plan may cost between $1,000 and $10,000, and a good trust and estate lawyer can charge upwards of $350 an hour, so the $64,000 question about a financial team is, How can you maintain one without going broke? One way is to avoid paying double or triple for the same services. For instance, if a stockbroker charges a fee to refer you to a money manager who charges a fee to invest your money in a mutual fund that charges a fee for management and expenses, then you have to ask yourself, Is all this stockpicking expertise really worth the money?

A friend of mine who was worried about duplication of fees and services got his entire team to sit down in a room and sort out who should do what and for how much. This was very helpful--but naturally he had to pay for their time.

REPORTER ASSOCIATES Ed Brown, Melanie Warner