Whether you’re 27 and starting a career or 57 and planning to retire, you may be wondering, “Should I hire a financial planner?” Will paying consultant fees result in significantly better financial decisions and less costly mistakes?
If you are a diligent saver and a competent investor, you may realize that there are not too many reasons to buy advisory services. If you don’t know something, for example do turning into a Roth IRA makes sense or not, you are comfortable exploring the answer yourself.
Before you conclude that you are equipped to ask the following questions on your own:
1. Do I need help with financial planning – or am I looking for stock advice?
Let’s say you’re weighing whether to buy a new home, not sure how much to spend on it or what kind of mortgage to get. Or you’re burdened with student loans, trying to save for your children’s education, and looking for tax-saving strategies.
Counselors are suited to address these issues. It’s all part of what they call “holistic financial planning.”
“You don’t need a financial planner to tell you what the next Tesla will be like or whether Apple shares will rise in price over the next five years,” said Harold Pollack, co-author of The Index Card: Why Personal Finance Doesn’t Have to Be Complicated. you will if you expect it. “
2. Am I willing to follow this person’s advice or do I just want to hear what I want to hear?
Some investors hire an advisor to get a seal of approval for what they are already doing. They want to be able to say, “Look, this sharp counselor didn’t tell me anything I didn’t already know.”
But if you are sincerely eager to learn and accept fresh ideas, you are more likely to enjoy a useful working relationship with a counselor.
“Be prepared to hear from a financial planner what may not be stimulating your ego at that point,” said Pollack, a professor at the Crown Family School of Social Work at the University of Chicago. “What the planner says may be distasteful at the moment. And that can be great, ”because it offers an insight you would otherwise miss.
3. Do I have the discipline to stay on the course?
For many counselors, much of their job is to hold clients in their hands during crises. For example, urging investors to “stick to the plan” and avoiding panic sales during a stock market crash may prove invaluable.
“The money is very emotional,” said Rishi Bharathan, CEO of Fairfax, VA, the headquarters of WiserAdvisor, an online firm that compares consumers to advisors. “Most people don’t recognize it,” so if they’re not disciplined and able to control their feelings, they may want to pay a financial planner to provide a voice of reason.
4. Do I understand risk well?
Soon after hiring a counselor, you could fill out a questionnaire to assess your risk tolerance. If you are already well aware of your attitude to risk – and your ability to overcome large changes in your net worth without flickering – then a counselor may not add much to the path of portfolio building.
On the other hand, some investors do not know their comfort level with risk until it is too late. A counselor can position your portfolio to maintain common sense if you otherwise feel upset when you suffer short-term short-term losses. “Most people think they understand the risk, and that can be dangerous,” Bharathan said.
5. To what extent would access to the knowledge and technology of the advisor (for investment assessment and management) improve my financial life compared to doing it alone?
You can go without an advisor if you have enough knowledge about financial markets, investments and other aspects of money management, from budgeting, estate planning to retirement planning. But the real question is how your knowledge matches the knowledge of the counselor.
“Financial advisors have access to solutions and technology that the general public doesn’t have,” said Angie Herbers, CEO of Herbers & Co., an independent advisory management advisor in Austin, Texas.
6. Who do I know and trust – experts and friends – who are ready to help me better understand my financial life?
Even the masters themselves benefit from the support network. “A really rich person will tell you that wealth is what surrounds you,” Herbers said. “If you decide to do it yourself, you simply say, ‘I’m smarter than an expert,’ and a mentality better than a mentality is not the way the rich build and maintain their money.”
Read more: How to prevent inflation from biting much of your investment
Also read: Peter Thiel turned his Roth IRA into a pot of gold. You can too – but you have to “tread carefully”
