Advisors

Today I read the following article by the very respected Allan Roth:
https://www.advisorperspectives.com/articles/2026/07/20/how-cfp-board-sold-public-profession
I have always regarded the CFP designation was the gold standard for advisors, and meant I could trust the advisor was looking out for my best interests. It appears this may no longer be the case.
About a year from now I will be looking for a new financial advisor as we analyze our overall financial situation once we both claim Social Security,

To try to keep up with the 21st century, I recently started to use ChatGPT.
I have an excellent financial advisor, who is a Certified Financial Planner, and for over 40 years, I have also made a lot of investment decisions on a “do-it-yourself” basis. I have read the Humble Dollar for years as well.
An early request to ChatGPT was to develop a training plan for me to help me revive a long-neglected hobby. I was very pleased with the analysis and the specific suggestions that ChatGPT provided to me.

A couple of year after retiring from a career in translation and the organization of international conferences, I enrolled in a graduate program for Financial Planners at Rice University and subsequently passed the CFP exam. I didn’t intend to go back to work, and I haven’t. What motivated me was an interest in learning how to manage my own finances better. In the process, I gained an appreciation for financial planning as a profession and would consider it seriously if I were starting out again.

We recently had another meeting with my wife’s financial advisor. At our previous meeting I’d been fairly open about my opinion that he hadn’t delivered meaningful investment gains compared to my own self-managed Vanguard portfolio, and at considerably higher fees. I suspect he wasn’t thrilled about that.
He came prepared. He presented a multi-sheet analysis of how his firm had managed my wife’s investments in the lead-up to the 2022 bond crash: aggressively de-risking into ultra-short duration bonds and cash-like instruments,

I suspect like me, most HD members are against paying large yearly fees to investment advisors. I have made all of our investment decisions and have done pretty well. I also do our taxes.
While I have no immediate plans to stop, because my wife has no interest in any of it, and is considerably younger, chances are she will be left alone at some point to figure out RMDs, SS, taxes, asset allocation etc.
I have looked at Vanguard,

I recently had my quarterly review with my financial advisor at a well-known national RIA with an office in my city. They prepare a thorough presentation with economic updates and detailed performance on all my holdings. While I follow my portfolio regularly, these meetings are valuable. They give my wife and me a chance to ask questions and stay aligned.
A little background: My accounts were previously managed by an advisor at a national brokerage firm in the city where I last worked full-time.

Last summer, I wrote about a frustrating dynamic in our household: I manage my portfolio with low-cost index funds, while my wife Suzie pays nearly 2% annually to a wealth manager. Several comments asked for an update on my campaign to win her over to a lower-cost approach that would benefit our combined future wealth.
My initial efforts got Suzie to open a Vanguard account, which we funded with cash in a money market fund. This let her get comfortable with the platform.

Would love some insight/suggestions/experience from this well versed and knowledgeable group.
My husband has two tax deferred accounts that have a substantial balance and that he needs to rollover into an IRA now that he is fully retired. We currently have brokerage accounts at Schwab and Vanguard and I am torn between rolling over these 2 accounts fully into one of these two brokerage houses. I like having both accounts so I don’t see closing one but want to make one our primary account.

I was watching YouTube the other day when an ad popped up for a financial advisory firm. Normally I skip ads, but this one caught my attention. The advisor opened by saying something that sounded reassuring:
“We only get paid if your portfolio increases in value.”
At first glance, that sounds fair—even noble. But let’s slow down and be clear about what’s really being said.
First, the market usually goes up
Historically,

I work with US citizens scattered across ~26 countries, so I recently asked my go-to AI which U.S. investment firms handle expats the best. Here’s the short version on Schwab, Fidelity and Vanguard.
1. Charles Schwab — Best for U.S. Expats
Schwab is easily the most expat-friendly of the major brokerages. It allows U.S. citizens abroad to open and maintain accounts, including its dedicated Schwab International Account. Trading stocks and ETFs is usually unrestricted, customer service understands expat needs and the linked Schwab Bank makes moving money internationally simple.

My sister called and asked if she should get a financial advisor.
Her question made me pause, because I’ve wondered the same thing myself.

How “right” do you have to be when you invest?
How much better does an advisor need to be to make up for their fee?
Is it more important to pick the right investments or to be tax-efficient?
And if I’ve managed to stay the course through market storms, do I even need an advisor at all?

I noticed that in the post by Dick Quinn – beyond-fees-is-using-a-financial-advisor-advisable , couple of folks had mentioned having flat-fee advisors. I see that it is lot easier to find advisors that charge a % of the assets under management but one that I am not fond of.
Have read mixed reviews about FACET, have found two sites that have flat-fee FAs

https://www.flatfeeadvisors.org/
https://saragrillo.com/2022/03/14/flat-fee-financial-advisors/

Are there other resources that one can look up?
Part of the “holistic”

There was a discussion recently on HD about the costs/benefit of a financial advisor.
I have more questions. Who needs a financial advisor and why? I have looked up the pros and cons and certainly a case can be made for using an advisor, but not always. 
I have never used an advisor, but that doesn’t mean I wouldn’t be better off if I did.  I asked at Fidelity, but the fee percentage – I think it was 1% a few years ago –

There’s a debate ongoing in the UK at the moment around a cash-only tax-advantaged account, and if the benefit should be reduced from a yearly £20,000 deposit allowance to £4,000. This is with the aim of making people favor equity-based, tax-advantaged accounts to enhance returns. Very UK specific, but it got me thinking once again about the general idea of holding cash as a defensive asset in your portfolio for sequence of returns (SOR) risk when in retirement.

Suzie and I present a microcosm of the debate around financial advisors. I choose to use Vanguard and keep my costs low, whereas Suzie uses a former long-time colleague from her days in the banking sector who happens to be an independent wealth manager to operate her portfolio. To me, the portfolio seems unnecessarily complicated with an average fund fee of slightly over 1.5% in addition to a 0.5% advisor fee. This seems exorbitant in my eyes.