If You’re a Smart Investor, Do You Really Need a Financial Advisor?

If you’ve spent years successfully managing your own investments, do you really need a financial advisor? That’s the question Bob, one of our listeners, sent in. He’s got an MBA, knows the markets well, and has always handled his portfolio solo. So, is working with an advisor just an extra expense, or could it actually add real value? In this episode, we break down when and why even experienced investors might benefit from professional guidance and when they’re probably fine on their own.

 

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Transcript: 

 

Speaker 1:

If you've spent years successfully managing your own investments, do you really need a financial advisor? That's a question that one of our listeners sent in, and it works really well, because earlier this month, we had a similar question, but from a business owner's standpoint. So let's tackle it now from the other side and see if we can help you break it down here on Plan With The Tax Man.

 

Hey everybody, welcome to the podcast. Thanks for hanging out with Tony and myself as we talk investing, finance and retirement. Of course, Tony here is the star of the show, if you will. He's the CPA and the CFP, he's the big kahuna. He's an EA with 30-plus years of experience helping folks get to and through retirement. And Tony, we had an email question that came into the website, yourplanningpros.com, you get lots of emails for things, and this one was based off the podcast. But either way, it was still interesting this month, so we tackled really two of them this month, in the month of February, thinking about the business owner's standpoint from our last episode for a question that had come in about, hey, I've built a nice business, but how do I make a retirement plan out of that? So if folks didn't check that out, feel free to go check out that prior episode, Plan With The Tax Man, on whatever app you like using. You can also find that information on his website at yourplanningpros.com.

 

And this week, we're going to do a similar question, but this is from Bob, and it's more the DIY, just do the normal thing retirement planning yourself. So Bob's question, Tony, says, "I have an MBA and I understand investments well. I've always handled my portfolio myself instead of having professional help, and I've done pretty good at it, if I'm being honest. So in your honest opinion," he says, "Is there really any reason for someone like me to work with someone like you, an advisor?" So we get a lot of this, and the DIY movement's been very popular the last couple of years.

 

Tony Mauro:

It has, yeah.

 

Speaker 1:

And so, it's certainly a fair question, because a lot of people definitely have taken this route. And Tony, I'll set you up this way, I'll let you just jump right in and tackle it how you want to with his question. But to me, the biggest piece is, is it the accumulation phase he's been working on or the distribution phase? Because it sounds like the accumulation, just based on this question, and that is a whole lot easier, I think, than the preservation, distribution, AKA the retirement phase. But anyway, what do you think?

 

Tony Mauro:

The honesty is it depends, because if he truly is savvy enough that he thinks he is and basically doesn't have a lot of worries about what he's doing and how he's progressing and he feels good about it, we would tell him, "Hey, look," if we were sitting... What we do, the first phase of our whole planning process is we sit the client down and have them basically answer 10 extremely easy questions and we score it, and if they don't, based on their own responses, show some anxiety or worry or need for help, I tell them, "I don't really know why you're here in this meeting because it looks like you'v