Unfortunately, many following an aggressive wealth building plan will need to employ financial partners in order to succeed. I am against this personally and recommend learning speculate in financial markets (using proper risk control strategies) instead, but this option will not be practical for everyone. To those who find themselves in this camp, please heed the following words of advice.

The difference between your investment portfolio making it and tanking is who you choose for your financial partners. To minimize your chances of a financial disaster, avoid the following types of people at all costs:

Con Artists
Unskilled Advisors & Money Managers
Affiliate Marketers
Action Junkies
Anyone who Breached Trust in the Past

Con artists are people who have a personal agenda that doesn't include your best interests, but represent themselves as someone who does have your best interests in mind. These crooks come in every shape and size. Also included in this group are those individuals who aren't necessarily out to blatantly steal from you, but whom knowingly misrepresent their skills or abilities to you.

Unskilled advisors & amateur money managers are everywhere. Anyone can claim to be a brilliant trader or to have developed a Holy Grail system of some sort. Don't pay for their education with your hard-earned dollars.

Affiliate marketers only care about earning a few bucks in referral fees for themselves and will lie & tell you anything in pursuit of that paltry sum. Very often they would never put their own money into what they are selling.

Action junkies are just degenerate gamblers, and unfortunately the trading world is full of them. Often they will have already lost all of their own funds and will gain employment trading a managed account as a way to stay in action. Some of these guys are pretty good and can go months or even years showing incredible returns. But their risk of ruin is always very high and sooner or later they get wiped out and there goes all your money. Beware of very high returns. (Read the book The Education of a Speculator for the real-life story of a very large successful hedge fund manager who eventually lost hundreds of millions in investor deposits).

Anyone that you have got wind of ever having breached anyone's trust in the past should also be avoided like the plague. These complaints are rarely unfounded. This includes minor things like saying one thing and doing another, being purposefully vague about their intentions, or unilaterally adjusting even a minor point of a contract. These are all chilling prophecies of things to come.

The best defense against accidentally hooking up with any of these types is self-education and demanding credentials. You should attain a reasonable level of knowledge about any area you are putting your money into. This will aide you in identifying those whom are not philosophically aligned with your purpose, as well as those who are just plain full of it. Demand credentials along with references and a performance history from anyone managing your money.