Why is it generally a good idea to have a Financial Advisor?
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My name is Phil Ratcliff and I just wanted to take a couple of minutes of your time to help you understand why it can be very advantageous to have an advisor.
I made this video really because, I do talk about this a good bit, but a lot of times I’m talking about it to my clients and to other people that already have advisors. So, in that respect, I’m preaching to the choir. I was hoping by putting this content on the website maybe I would talk to some people that don’t or haven’t had advisors in the past realize and say, “What is the value?”
I just always hear people say, “Get the lowest cost, Reduce your costs, That’s the best thing you can do with investments,” and that is really true, but only to a certain point. It’s kind of like that old saying, “Yes, you want to save money, but you don’t want to be cheap.” A lot of times you get what you pay for.
When we really look at what the average investor does over time, the average investor tends to underperform the markets by about 3-4% per year. Now, that’s just the average, okay, and so many people will say, “Well, that’s not me, that’s somebody else.” Well, that’s what we always say because we don’t want anybody to tell us that we’re not as good as we think we are. When you look and when they do those surveys to say, “Are you better than the average driver?,” 90% of people say, “Yes.” When we do surveys looking at investors, and we go through Vanguard and through Fidelity, and TD Ameritrade, and just take these big surveys to say, “Are you better than the average investor?” That’s upwards of like 95% of people will say, “Yes.” That’s worse than the average driver thing, and we can tell you we’ve got the numbers saying that the average investor is 3-4%. So even if you’re not the average or worse, which, odds are, most people are, then you’re probably still underperforming the markets.
So when we look at that and ask, “Why?”
Human beings aren’t built to be machines. We are not logic machines, especially when it’s your money and there are emotions tied to it, and there is a glut of information out there from CNBC to The Wall Street Journal, to all these other information sources and then the fact that you may be in a totally different area to how you use data and information to perform your occupation may be totally different. So you combine all these elements together and that’s what’s happening.
Over the last 10 years, even Morningstar has put together a lot of information to state, “If you do have an advisor that helps you with your financial planning, your retirement planning, your investment selection and rebalancing to make sure that you make rational decisions instead of emotional decisions. Coordinate your tax planning between you and your advisor, if you have a tax professional, to make sure that all these things … that advisor probably brings somewhere between 1.4 to 2% per year in value.
When you look at a firm like rebel Financial, we charge 1.2 to 0.5% per year. There’s a ton of value there and I’d really like to push that out there for discussion.
I put a couple of the white papers on my website so you can actually see my references, not just that I’m saying things like, “believe me because I totally believe in what I do.”
It’s a very symbiotic relationship, and even if you work with another advisor, you know, if you find somebody that’s going to do the things I mentioned in this video, it’ll be a great thing for you, your family and, hopefully, all the financial goals that you want to achieve.
I appreciate your time, and we hope to be able to help you towards a brighter financial future.