Money’s Best: Marguerita Cheng is one of the Top Women Financial Planners 2025
July 10, 2025, Money magazine — Marguerita Cheng, CFP® Pro, is one of Money’s choices for the top 30 women planners this year.
The editors explain: “All highly qualified, customer-centric financial advisors who serve clients of all backgrounds. Whether you need comprehensive financial planning or niche expertise for a life transition, these financial experts are well-equipped to help you live a richer life. This list of the best financial planners is a collaboration between Money and the Financial Planning Association (FPA), a trade association and membership organization that represents more than 17,000 financial planners across the United States.”
Click here to see who made the list.
Here’s How Money Chose the Best Financial Planners
- The partnership allowed Money to benefit from the assets and knowledge of FPA, while also carrying out an independent evaluation.
- Money partnered with FPA to develop a comprehensive survey of 35 questions, which was emailed to the association’s membership. As we detail below, the queries included questions about qualifications and planning experience, as well as requests for the planner to quantify the importance they attach to a number of factors and behaviors when working with clients.
- Money led the development of the survey methodology. The association served as a consultant to those efforts, but with safeguards to ensure it had no direct influence on how the list of best planners would be determined, nor which professionals might be included.
- FPA assisted Money in fine tuning our understanding of the components of financial planning, and how best to express those in order that they would be clear to survey respondents.
- It also engaged more than a dozen FPA members in discussions — both in person and virtually — in support of the questionnaire development. We probed their views on the relative importance of a number of factors to the success of the comprehensive financial planning process. These consultations were within groups of planners, with any actionable input arising from a consensus of the group, supplemented by additional research, both empirical and based on reporting.
- Money then finalized the methodology, with the assistance of an independent survey-design consultant who has decades of experience with survey research at Consumer Reports, among other organizations. We narrowed down the various factors required for eligibility for the list, and that would be weighted in order to determine how respondents eligible for the list would be scored (and so ranked) within it.