What happens minute-by-minute shouldn’t matter to someone with long-term goals. That’s what one investment company printed at the top of its November newsletter. And while it may be sage advice, finding potential clients that can think long-term is the real challenge facing Midstate financial advisers.

Only days after frustrated bank customers took part in Bank Transfer Day and closed personal accounts in protest of fee increases and customer service shortcomings, Nashville-area financial advisers are hoping some of those folks wander into their offices wanting to do something with their money other than moving it from one bank to another.

However, after two recessions in 10 years, financial scandals that rocked Wall Street, massive unemployment and banks squeezing struggling homeowners while raising credit card rates, these people closing accounts – and many more – are uncertain about who they now can trust with their money. In fact, when Money magazine recently asked readers to pick a story they’d most like to see in an upcoming ‘reader’s choice’ issue, the top topic was: ‘How to find financial advice you can trust.’

“Yes, people can trust us with their money,” says Martin Pyle, a financial adviser with Edward Jones in Bellevue. “It’s not time to panic. Markets always recover. When the market crashed in 2008, it affected [hundreds] of our clients. But we reminded them they were in something designed for the long haul – not short-term – and worked to calm their fears.”

Pyle’s view is almost universal among financial consultants. However, most people see the future at arm’s length, not by gazing out at the horizon. That presents a problem for investment companies that banks and credit unions don’t have.

“We live in a drive-through, microwave, instant-gratification culture. People want what they want and want it now,” says Eric Berner of Waddell & Reed Financial Advisers. “A financial planner’s job is to teach people how to avoid temptation, look at ‘wants’ objectively, without emotion.”

Berner, an adviser who works out of Waddell & Reed’s downtown Nashville office, acknowledges it’s not an easy sell.

“Short-term fluctuations are normal, but nowadays every negative blip gets reported and they fuel emotions in people – from anger to fear,” he adds.

“Face it, good news doesn’t sell newspapers or get you to tune in to news programs on TV; only bad news does. And if you use history as a guide, you see that markets have always reacted to ‘bad’ news (from recession, scandal, conflict, disasters, etc.), but over time the markets adjust.”

Financial advice isn’t always what people want to hear, either. As folks have had no trouble pointing fingers at politicians, corporate CEOs and their employers, blaming them for the current financial mess, few have turned a finger toward themselves.

“The truth is being financially fit has nothing to do with money. Financial fitness has to do with decision-making,” says Berner, who has a list of questions for clients. “Are you spending more than you earn? Are you using credit cards? Are you buying the newest car or the latest iPhone? Do you need the things you are buying or do you just want them?”

He says his work begins when people realize it’s time to plan and they need help doing it. Technically most financial advisers provide information and choices to their clients then receive pay or compensation for managing those choices. All the responsibility for risk assessment lies with them. And they lay the groundwork for folks who have very little experience with planning.

“Do you know that people spend more time planning a single vacation than they do for their own retirement?” Berner asks. “Investing really is not a do-it-yourself thing. That’s why we’re here.”

These advisers are here for those who are seeking long-term strategies for their money, not for those looking to make a quick buck. They allocate a client’s investments based on a strategy that factors in things like time and risk, and they hammer the point that investing is a marathon, not a sprint.

“At times like these we have to play psychologist as well as broker,” Pyle says.

And the times they are-a-changing, or at least they have been.

Bank of America’s initial plan to collect $60 a year from each of its millions of debit-card users to compensate for caps on transaction fees imposed by 2010’s Dodd-Frank financial overhaul was the last in a string of events that have brought anger and mistrust into the minds of U.S. residents.

There’s lingering frustration at major financial institutions for their roles in bursting the housing bubble, disbelief at wrist-slap bailouts for the guilty in the 2008 financial crisis, and of course, worry over the ongoing economic slump.

Closer to home, Tennesseans are enduring double-digit unemployment, record foreclosures and an ever-growing string of Ponzi schemes and fraud cases, the most notable being that of Michael J. Park, a former Brentwood financial adviser and owner of Park Capital Management Group who was found guilty of defrauding investors and given a 96-month sentence in December 2010.

This news rides on a steady stream of financial information and business reports – many times conflicting with one another – delivered 24 hours a day. Some bring optimistic forecasts; most spout doom and gloom, but all bring more fears that the person you now entrust with your money – or the next one – will find a way to lose a good chunk of it.

But Pyle is accustomed to allaying those fears. He says Edward Jones, which cut its teeth in small town mid-America, thinks its brand of relationship building with clients has helped the company navigate through choppy financial waters.

“We cut through the (mostly media) noise for clients, give them perspective and remind them that risk is always a factor with investments,” says Pyle.

“Information streams are confusing, and most are not relevant. Clients call me in the morning and ask me if I saw what the Asian markets were doing,” he adds. “Seriously they do. And they think it’s really important because somebody on CNBC is telling them it is. They really need to turn the TV off.”

Morgan Housel, who pens the column The Motley Fool, says some historical perspective is lacking when people talk about the current financial crisis.

“What’s important is realizing there are injustices with bailouts, cronyism and money in politics, and people should really be upset about them,” Housel says. “But they should realize at the same time that the economic system we have in the United States, compared to the rest of the globe, has created more wealth for everybody than almost any other country on Earth.

“There are problems in this country, but we really don’t want to upend the entire system,” adds Housel. “It’s really important that the protesters don’t turn against capitalism but focus on the perversions of capitalism like bailouts and cronyism.”

Companies like Edward Jones and Waddell & Reed follow strict guidelines, and plans to tighten them even more have been proposed in Washington.

Congress and regulators have been mulling what’s known as fiduciary duty: the idea that a financial professional should put a client’s best interests ahead of his or her own. That’s the standard to which registered investment advisers have been held, and as part of 2010’s financial reform legislation, the Securities and Exchange Commission was authorized to impose, if it saw fit, a fiduciary standard on anyone who sells securities and provides personalized investment advice.

Currently, SEC chair Mary Schapiro says she favors a universal standard, and though she’s begun developing rules for it, the standard won’t be in place for at least a year, Money magazine reports.

The magazine wrote that while it could take years to resolve the debate between federal legislators and regulators over how to make the financial advice industry trustworthy, ultimately neither ethics nor competence can be legislated.

“We’ve been here 75 years, and there’s a reason for that,” says Berner of Waddell & Reed. “People feel comfortable working with us. They ask people they know who they trust with their money; they do their homework; their due diligence. We can’t ask more than that.”

The stains of the Madoff scandal may be hard to remove but blaming investment companies for that is misdirected. No investment adviser, for example, should ever have custody of your securities (which Madoff had), Pyle explains. Your money should be held with the home office.

“That’s what we mean by due diligence,” Pyle says. “Also, if Madoff told his clients they were getting 10 percent returns when the industry average was 2 percent, that was a ‘red flag,’ too. And that was the time to walk away.”

Most of the advisers say that while economic recovery has been slow, at least it’s recovery and not more recession. In fact, one market analyst thinks this presents an opportunity for folks like Pyle and Berner. Because U.S. stocks are down to near-bear market lows, reflecting the typical price declines of a mild recession, those who believe the market will not see more steep drops should consider adding some “attractively priced investments,” reports Kate Warne, a New York investment strategist.

“While the market can certainly move lower short term, since fear remains the dominant emotion, eventually it should pay attention to the positive fundamentals and likely start to move higher,” Warne says. “This outcome, I think, is more than twice as likely to happen as a recession.”

That notion requires long-term vision and years of experience. It also brings risk. Or more simply, it requires what financial advisers already bring to the table every day.

“I have this definition of financial security,” Berner says. “It’s the ongoing practice of striking a balance between being responsible today while planning wisely for tomorrow.”

It may explain too how the same person can pull money out of a bank account and trust a financial adviser with it.

For more information on financial advice and individual investors, visit finra.org or adviserinfo.sec.gov.