I am a financial advisor, so weigh what follows with that in mind. But I would rather you hear this from someone inside the business than from someone selling against it.
The honest answer has two halves, and most articles only give you one.
Where advisors mostly do not help
Picking winners. If you are paying someone to beat the market, the record is poor. In 2025, 79% of actively managed large-company U.S. funds trailed the S&P 500. These are full-time professionals with research teams. Your advisor is unlikely to do better by choosing among them.
So if the pitch is “I will find the best funds” or “I know when to get out,” be skeptical. That is the part of the job the evidence does not support.
Where advisors can help
In the unglamorous parts.
Vanguard has spent years trying to measure this. Its estimate is that an advisor following good practices can add about 3% a year in net returns. Read the fine print with me, though. Vanguard says the benefit is intermittent, not a yearly bonus, and that it varies with each client’s circumstances. The largest single piece, in its estimate, is behavioral coaching. In plain words: stopping you from selling at the bottom or chasing what just went up.
The rest is plumbing. Keeping costs low. Rebalancing. Putting the right investments in the right kind of account so the tax bill is smaller. Deciding which account to draw from first in retirement.
None of that is exciting. All of it leaks money when nobody is watching it.
A good advisor does not make you rich. A good advisor stops you from making yourself poor.
So do they “make you money”?
Not by outsmarting anyone. If an advisor helps, it is by plugging leaks: fees you did not need to pay, taxes you did not need to owe, and the one panicked decision that costs more than ten years of fees.
That means the answer depends on you.
If you already invest in low-cost funds, never sold in a downturn, and have a simple tax picture, there may be few leaks to plug. Paying 1% a year to fix problems you do not have is a bad trade, and I tell people so.
If you have sold in a panic before, or you have a business, stock options, or accounts in five places that nobody coordinates, the leaks are probably bigger than the fee.
Three questions to test your own advisor
What did you do for me last year besides choose investments? A real answer has specifics: a tax move, a plan update, a decision they talked you through.
What would I have done without you in the last bad market? Be honest with yourself here. If the answer is “exactly the same thing,” that part of the value is zero for you.
What did you get wrong, and what did you change? Every advisor has an answer if they are being straight with you. The Honest Ledger is built on that one question.
Run both sides in dollars
Related questions: is a 1% advisor fee worth it, is my advisor doing a good job, advisor or do it yourself and what a financial advisor actually does.
One question for this week: if your advisor disappeared tomorrow, what is the first mistake you would be likely to make? If you cannot think of one, that tells you something too.
As always, if you want to talk any of this through, the door is open. Genti