Thanks for sharing your thoughts and experience Mark.

I’d agree that an investment advisor can be very helpful if you don’t have the time or inclination to learn how to pick your own investments.

In my case, I had enough of both to learn how to pick mutual funds, but not enough to pick stocks. As a result, I’ve been able to beat the market by about 1%/year for about 20 years.

As for a financial planner, that’s very important if you don’t have the knowledge and discipline to identify your financial priorities, figure out how much you need to fund them, create a plan to get from here to there, stick with the plan, and when life throws you a curveball, figure out how to modify your plan to deal with your new reality.