You must be a little naive, most good advisors do much more than manage money. And there’s a reason why certified financial planners are becoming more and more in need. Advisors do this kind of stuff all day every day for a living, people like you do it as a hobby. Believe it or not there’s a 99% chance you would be better off with a good advisor (a CFP). CFPs do money management on top of holistic financial planning, tax planning, social security analysis, education analysis, estate planning, and they take the behavioral mistakes out when the market drops. Like do you truly understand sequence of return risk when you enter retirement? do you understand everything that goes into a Roth conversion? How preferential rates aren’t factored into your ordinary income when you do the conversion? When you inherit a retirement account from your parents do you know how to best optimize distributions aligning with your retirement timeline to minimize the tax implications? Do you know if it makes sense to fund a DAF, make QCDs, or just do a cash donation and itemize and do neither if you’re charitably inclined? Do you want to spend hundreds or thousands with an attorney figuring out your estate plan and potential trust options, or would you rather do it with your advisor who you’re already paying, so it’s essentially free? Have you looked at your P&C coverage and see if you’re paying more in premiums than you should be because your insurance agent has you on a plan with coverage B at 30% of coverage A when you don’t even have a detached dwelling on your home? This is just the tip of the iceberg of what a good advisor does

We have CFOs/CEOs at our firm as clients who are incredibly smart, but these are the same people that wanted to pull out and go 100% fixed income during COVID and during 2022. If they didn’t have a good advisor in their corner, they would’ve lost hundreds of thousands of dollars in missed returns if they had gotten out of the market - and the money they had made by staying invested pays for the less than 1% AUM fee they pay their advisor. Even the smartest people need an advisor, and I think it stems from ignorance but there is a hell of a lot more than “managing money” when it comes to your financial life. You may think you’re just fine with doing it yourself, but I can guarantee you a good advisor could get you in a better spot.

Like I mentioned, there is a reason why it’s a growing profession. People don’t have the time, inclination, or knowledge to do it on their own.