Benjamin Felix

So I'm going to get into what this client wrote.

So keep in mind, this is a long post that they wrote in a group chat type setting.

Here's what factored into my decision to make the change from DIY couch potato style investing to an assets under management financial advisor.

This is just my own thought process.

I'm not trying to change anyone's opinion here, but hopefully the share is interesting.

I've been self-directed my entire life and have spent the past 10 plus years getting serious about building up more in-depth knowledge about the pros and cons of different approaches to investing.

I don't have particularly complex needs.

And I've been a long VEQT for ages now.

So it took quite a while to work through my hesitations to the AUM, the asset center management model.

Even a few months ago, I was pretty sure I wanted a fee only advisor.

So this is pretty fresh and not informed by actual experience yet.

I'll start with why I went with an advisor at all, roughly ordered from most important to me to least.

Financial planning, my top reason for finding an advisor.

I'm starting to think about how to optimize for funding my life after I stopped working.

I built fairly complex spreadsheets to project out drawdowns across my accounts to get a baseline idea of where I'm at.

But even with tax planning included, they're still crude and unoptimized compared to something like Conquest, which again is the software that PWL uses.

An advisor can use it to model and optimize drawdown scenarios, then run thousands of Monte Carlo market return simulations.

That's actually a good tie-in because that's what we're talking about.

To help buffer against unexpected conditions that build robustness and security into the plan.

I knew that I couldn't effectively plan for the future without this level of specific planning capability.