Professionals such as financial planners help people budget, prioritize and make goals for the future. Also, in most cases, they offer investment advice to meet those goals. However, financial planners do charge fees for their services, so unless you have significant income it might not be worth your time and effort to work with a financial planner.
High Cost
While they are not necessarily expensive, the services of financial planning professionals are not cheap. You can expect to pay a minimum of $30 to $50 an hour and many well-known financial planners charge hundreds of dollars per hour, or even a percentage of the total amount they manage.
Bad Advice
Financial planning professionals offer no guarantees. Their advice can be, and sometimes is, wrong. Sometimes economic circumstances change--dramatically--making previous assumptions and advice wrong and resulting in significant investment losses. Many people do very well with their own financial planning.
Financial Planning Can Be Time Consuming
Undertaking a comprehensive financial plan is a time-consuming exercise, especially in the initial stages. Unless you have a good bit of income to protect, maybe you are better off working a little overtime rather than trying to micromanage a small portfolio.
References
Writer Bio
Clayton Browne has been writing professionally since 1994. He has written and edited everything from science fiction to semiconductor patents to dissertations in linguistics, having worked for Holt, Rinehart & Winston, Steck-Vaughn and The Psychological Corp. Browne has a Master of Science in linguistic anthropology from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.