Read “Faith or Folly” by Rav Yaakov Hillel.
Rav Yaakov Hillel is a mekubal, who heads one of the biggest kabbalah yeshivos in the world (it’s in Meah Shearim/Geula area), many GEDOLIM hold of him, and many gedolim and chashuv rabbonim have even studied kabbalah by him in his yeshiva (including Rav Pincus zt”l).
In very short, while there are real mekubalim, he says (don’t quote be verbatim, you can read the book and/or listen to his shiurim on this, which exist in English! but..)that in general nowadays it is not “mekubal” (pardon the pun) to use practical kabbalah, and generally true mekubalim only STUDY kabbalah, but some may have deeper torah insight but there are 2 huge caveats:
1) They may not be advising people in order to get money, which many do…
2) For people who may have all these amazing stories to say about some of them – he says that it is shayich to have kochos from the “tzad hatumah” (i.e. through impure channels) and that even though they CAN foresee future through it – it is not thru kedusha and it can both be warped, and we a klal yisrael are above mazalos, and it can be the satan trying to convince you that your path is set when we as yidden are never stuck to a path set for the future.
There is a story he tells from point #2 with a man who had no parnosa and went for advice which is freaky and illustrates the point…
You can hear one of his shiurim with this story in it at the following link:
http://ohr.edu/yhiy/article.php/1783 (click on the link for Rabbi Yaakov Hillel – for me only audio worked in IE but also video worked in Mozilla, not in IE for some reason)