Half the battle of managing the family's finances is saving. The other half is getting good professional advice about how to invest.

Lately, both of these tasks have been getting tougher thanks to higher loan rates, unreliable salespeople and outright fraud.

Our family finances are under attack on all fronts.

Some of the investment companies, brokerages and insurance companies we respected the most have been charged with a number of violations that hurt our pocketbooks.

Among them: Improper market timing; paying higher commissions to sales people for hyping their specific investments; and failure to disclose important information.

But leaving those companies may not be so safe either.

The North American Securities Administrators Association, an organization of state securities regulators, warns about all the fraudsters.

It cites unregistered investments, fake promissory notes, high-yield investments, fake Web sites, and variable annuity sales practices as other major threats to our money.

The No. 1 threat, it says, involves "ponzi schemes." Fraudsters pay early investors with money raised from later investors. Many have lost millions in the end.

NASAA says senior citizens, in particular, are at great risk. "Beware of the high surrender fees and steep sales commissions agents often earn when they move investors into variable annuities," it says.

Also, con artists increasingly are targeting religious, ethnic, cultural and professional groups with fraudulent programs.

And as oil and gas prices rise, stay away from the types of oil and gas investments that cost investors big money in the past.

Here are some issues to consider before investing your hard-earned money.

Check whether a security is registered. You can look it up on the Securities and Exchange Commission's Web site at www.sec.gov. It's true that not all securities are registered. Among those that need not be registered: private offerings to a limited number of people or institutions; offerings of limited size; and intrastate offerings and securities of municipal, state and federal governments.

However, these investments may have requirements under state laws, so also check them out with your state securities regulator at www.nasaa.org.

Keep in mind that even if an investment is registered, regulators do not necessarily check the accuracy of filed information. So you have to do some investigation on your own.

But you might be able to recover some money if you can prove that a disclosure on a registration was incomplete or inaccurate.

At the same Web sites, check that anyone who sells you a security is properly licensed and has no complaints filed against him or her.

A trustworthy financial adviser should evaluate how an investment fits into your overall financial plan. For example, if you need money to live on, an adviser should not be putting money into high-risk technology stocks.

A good insurance agent should conduct an analysis to determine how much life insurance you need. He or she should recommend the financially strongest insurance company that charges the lowest cost per thousand dollars of insurance.

A financial adviser and insurance agent should disclose how much is charged in commissions and how the commissions are paid. An adviser or agent should disclose whether he or she is getting bonuses from an investment company or insurance company for selling specific investments. They also should disclose any annual fees and discuss how well mutual fund and life insurance programs perform.

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