Using a Financial Advisor

When I think of an individual client's real problems, portfolio management's important, but wealth management is even more important. And you use a financial advisor-- I use a financial advisor-- You're not a financial do-do, I mean. And as I always say, it's the best check my wife writes every quarter. And then she doesn't trust him to make these decisions. That's right. You know, we get an enormous amount of value out of our financial advisor. And, I don't think I need help with the portfolio management part of it. It's much more about estate planning, taxes, legal issues that crop up. Just sort of a quarterback for the, and some of those are gonna be hard to replace with a robo-advisor. The computer is gonna have a hard time trying to help sort out some-- Well, what the computer can't do is try to figure out what your tastes and willingness to bare risk are. That's something, I think that's the big challenge for advisors is figuring out what kind of risks their clients are willing to take. Every time I talk to the new financial advisors coming looking at Dimensional, I tell 'em that's your biggest problem, or that's your biggest challenge is getting your investors, your clients to understand the dispersion of possible outcomes associated with different mixes of stocks, bonds, and other dimensions of risk and return. That's one challenge, but there's another is the manifestation of those outcomes. I mean, a big challenge for an advisor is to help their clients understand that this was a normal outcome, and that no, we don't need to adjust our portfolio because this quarter it went down. This was in the range of perfectly reasonable outcomes.