When I started out, I never found a decent/capable financial advisor that was good AND willing to manage/help if "workable asset" was less than $300k.
Where I would see a financial advisor may help you initially is to put a financial plan together. But what they do isn't really earth shattering, and you could probably read about how to it and/or get one from the web. Beyond just planning,
The real question is how financially disciplined are you AND your wife? You don't have to answer that question here. Just think about it. If you +spouse have issues investing/savings on a regular basis, perhaps you need any advisor to just keep your financial health in check. If you or your wife don't want to spend time doing this, then there may be some value in a FA too (time is money).Questions you may want to ask yourself: do you/wife buy things spontaneously. Over the past year or two, what were your biggest expenses, what's your savings/investment percentage. If you invest, do you gamble alot on stocks or mutual funds (speculative buying). Was your portfolio beating boring index funds (if not, you're better off doing just indexes) etc. How much time do you really want to spend doing tis yourself?
The landscape of financial advisors is large. I would say that you would be hard pressed to find a good one without having a lot of working assets for them to work with. The ones that I ran into from brokerage houses are just that.brokers. They try to sell me stock tips, etc and charge hefty commisions. Pretty useless for me, because they're most of the time wrong imho. If you are well disciplined, I would just do it yourself.
For me, I use a gentlemen from Wachovia. Mainly because my wife wants a safety cushion in case me and her (mainly me) does something stupid. At the same time, my financial advisor wants to take more control of our assets. I don't want him to for the same reason that I feel we need a safety cushion in case he screws up.
Based on his performance, he does better than me when we're in a bear market, and worse than me when we're in a bull market. Also, he charges about a 2% commision per year over a majority of the asset he manages. I'm wouldn't say he's great, I wouldn't say he's bad. Just normal conservative returns.
I guess I'm not estatic about financial advisors because it seems my family's access to "great" financial advisors is limited because we don't really have "a lot" to really be on the radar of great advisors. Or at least, I haven't seen them. Multi-multi-millionaires on this board might want to chime in. Because their experience may be different. And of course, you may run into one that is good.
That said, there's a lot i think you can do for yourself, and there's plenty of information on how to. Skip the infomercials about getting rich quick deals though. Also, although plenty would disagree, skip Suzie Orman. Nothing wrong with her per se, just I find her hellishly annoying..Not what she says, I guess more about the people that ask her the dumb questions.
