If you are reasonably financially literate, is a wealth manager ever worth it?

[HappiestLabrador]

NC for this.
We are in our forties with a high joint income. We already fill up all our tax wrappers efficiently, including the kids’ and invest the rest through an investment platform, plus early mortgage payments. We manage our own investments with a balanced, medium risk approach, with a reasonable diversification and have mostly done okay (and sometimes much better than the market.) We recently had a consultation with a chartered tax advisor and there was not much we could be doing differently to be more tax efficient. We are reluctant to get into EIS’s or VCT’s, investing in property, art or fine wine (I’m sure there are many other options.) DH (the highest earner) gets regular communications from wealth managers (I guess these are just IFA’s?) offering to assist us in parting with 1% of our investable assets a year in exchange for strategising and managing our money. But is there really anything they can do with our money that we can’t? Surely they would be using the same platforms and funds and would simply be taking a calculated risk like we do, but would need a stronger performance to break even? I’d be really interested to hear peoples’ thoughts about this, or their experiences, positive or otherwise.

Those are not good analogies.

A lot of financial planning is based on trying to predict the market and which investments will perform better than others. Qualifications only get you so far which is why financial experts only ‘beat’ the market around 8% of the time. Of course there is more to it than that and for those who have no interest in learning the basics, it’s probably sensible. But you can, as a layperson, learn plenty about investments without harming your financial future.

She didn’t say she was retired in her post. I don’t really care what she gets but the way she wrote it was misleading.

She says it in her first post. But I sort of agree about misleading, or rather I think any reference to beating the market can be a bit misleading unless it’s clear what you mean by “the market”. Talking about reward is a bit meaningless unless you also factor in risk.

I think this thread is a good illustration of why a little knowledge can be a dangerous thing. The most foolish person in investing is not the total beginner, it’s the person who’s watched ten hours of YouTube and is convinced they know as much as a professional. The Mumsnet version of this (“put it all in a Vanguard tracker”) is better than the Reddit version (“bet it all on GameStop call options”). But still not always appropriate.

There is no such thing as “the market.” There are many markets for many different asset classes. People who talk about “the market” generally mean equities (either global or sometimes just US). Investing in a low cost global equity tracker is a perfectly sensible thing to do for many people. But it would be foolish for a retired person with little financial confidence to put all their assets in such a vehicle, and a wealth manager who puts them in some sensible mix of stocks and bonds and cash, and explained what they are doing and why, has probably done well. And yet nevertheless some internet commentators will say “I could have done much better”.