I’m a Money Expert. Here’s What I Use a Financial Advisor For – Forbes Advisor

For the past 13 years, I’ve been obsessed with learning everything I could about money and how to make it work for me.

What started as a deep desire to escape poverty became a path to wealth—and a passion for sharing what I’ve learned with others. I’ve taught sold-out courses, written hundreds of articles and spent years helping women and teens gain control of their lives by discovering how to make money work for them. And in 2024, I decided to complement my personal experience with some official training by pursuing a Certified Financial Planner (CFP®) designation.

But even with all of this personal finance experience and education, I still choose to work with a financial advisor. So what do I need a financial advisor for? Turns out, quite a bit.

Realizing I Needed a Financial Advisor

During the pandemic, I was working for the Social Security Administration, and I was miserable. Like many others who worked with vulnerable populations at the time, my job was to help an endless stream of people while I only had access to limited resources. Years of collective stress had burned me out, and I couldn’t face another day of trying to be the compassionate person the public deserved. I needed out.

During the entirety of my career at Social Security, I maintained a miniscule budget while maximizing my investments. In addition to luck and privilege, I had modest desires at the time; I didn’t care if I lived with roommates in my 30s or drove a 15-year-old car with rope for a handle.

I’d applied all of my money expertise to put myself in an extremely safe position. I knew on paper that my family would be financially fine if I quit the job that was making me anxious and depressed.

But I still couldn’t do it.

No amount of independently crunching numbers or reading articles was going to give me the courage to leave. I needed professional guidance.

Double-Checking Numbers

The No. 1 reason I hired a financial advisor was to double-check all of my numbers and assumptions. Years of listening to podcasts, reading books, conversing with other experts in groups and watching my net worth go from less than a dollar to over half a million dollars had convinced me I excelled at budgeting and investing. But shifting your mindset from one where you invest most of your income to one where you’ve determined you need to spend it is difficult.

Like many people facing a sudden drop in income, I was scared.

The financial advisor I worked with reviewed all of my accounts and my plan for dipping into them, should I need to. They did more than just tell me, “You have enough money.” They ran multiple scenarios through their software to determine how much I could take out each year and what would happen if I was unemployed for longer than I had planned. They showed me what would happen if inflation rose substantially or we went through another recession.

Creating a Withdrawal Plan

The majority of my assets are in tax-advantaged retirement accounts. It’s a common misconception that you can’t access these accounts early without paying substantial penalties and taxes. I had spent years in the Financial Independence, Retire Early movement, learning ways to access these accounts early. But learning that something is technically possible still doesn’t give you the step-by-step instructions on how to do it best.

My financial advisor helped me create a detailed roadmap of when to shift assets within each account and when to withdraw from each account. I wasn’t sure what the future held for me. I could have been unemployed for an extended period of time or experienced no drop in income.

I needed my investments to continue to work for me in the most tax-efficient way possible for as long as possible until I determined I needed them. Working with an advisor helped me figure out the best way to do that.

What Could Go Wrong–and What Could Go Right?

At the time I was considering quitting, I had been freelancing off and on for years. I had no idea if freelancing full time would be lucrative enough to fund my lifestyle, so I had to plan for the worst-case scenario.

My advisor was happy to explain this and assure me that I wouldn’t starve; they weren’t all doom and gloom. In addition to asking what could go wrong, they helped me consider what could possibly go right.

Making a big change is scary. People come to financial advisors to help them through life’s biggest decisions. A great financial advisor has the experience and wisdom to listen to your fears and alleviate them, while also helping you realize your dreams are possible.

It turns out that my freelancing income surpassed my income with Social Security in the first month I started freelancing full time and I was earning quintuple my previous salary six months in. Suddenly, instead of withdrawing my Roth contributions I was opening a solo 401(k) and hiring an assistant.

Lessons Learned From Hiring a Financial Advisor

I believe everyone can benefit from hiring a financial advisor, whether your net worth is negative six figures from student loans or you’re two years away from retiring with $10 million. There’s a financial advisor out there for everybody, even people who are smart with money. Everyone can benefit from an outside perspective, especially an expert one that’s legally and ethically bound to serve in your best interests as a fiduciary.

Hiring a financial advisor earlier than I did would have saved me years of trying to fit into a career where I didn’t belong.

While I initially hired a financial advisor to help me decide if I could afford to quit, in the process I learned that having an outside perspective is invaluable and something I will want for the rest of my lifetime.