Do You Need a Financial Advisor?

Revisiting a prior post, let’s discuss whether you want or need a financial advisor (the spellings adviser and advisor are interchangeable, although it’s best to stick with one or the other to avoid confusion.)
First, need.
If you can read and write, you don’t ‘need’ an advisor. That is, of course, a gross oversimplification. Temperamentally, you may not have the diligence to learn a new vocabulary, then research the options, and come up with a plan for yourself.
Realistically, the tax laws, the snarled jungle of insurance, estate planning, retirement savings options and investment jargon may be too overwhelming, or too boring, for you to hack through.
So while you may not need one, you may certainly want one.
Depending on your level of wealth, you may also want tax advisors, which brokers and financial planners are mostly not. There are exceptions, but if you have that much money, then the oversight by a tax advisor coupled with a financial advisor is worth it. Good ones will not object to you having both. If you’re at the wealth level of estate planning, then someone with that expertise, an attorney specializing in estate planning, is another person you will add to the mix.
The reasons are simple, because it's complicated. Each of the three, financial, tax, legal, has a vested interest in making things increasingly complicated. They want complication because they become necessary, insuring their ability to charge fees because the average business owner, working stiff, doctor, whatever, doesn't have time to dig into a maze of rules and regulations.
Your state of residence further complicates your life by having different regulations regarding, taxes, estates and insurance.
If you don’t have an estate at the three million dollar level, then an estate plan is pointless, so you can skip the attorney. That said, you may want to have a will which, depending on your state, is something you need to get from an attorney, not a form from Office Depot.
A starting point is the financial advisor, or financial planner. They don’t have all the specifics, but have access to or have a decent general knowledge of possible pitfalls to help you decide what other professionals you may want to add.
We will follow up with what a financial advisor can help with, and what they cannot help with.
I’ll give you some litmus tests to guide you in figuring out whether the advice offered is something they can do, or something they imply they can do but can’t. You need not be mystified or dazzled by charts, graphs or statistics. They don’t tell you anything you need to know. They are props in the play. Designed to make you think the advisor knows more than he/she does.