Empower Financial advisor?

[Spiffy]

I have been using Empower to track my finances for the last few years. They called last week offering a free one-on-one phone call to go over my investments and I suppose to see if I would like to hire them as my personal financial advisor. The call went fine, and I am having another phone meeting next week to go over their recommendations. I assume at that time they will try to sell me on hiring them. I have never had an advisor before. I don't really know what to look for or what questions to ask. I work at a University and every year we are able to meet with someone from Capstone for free to go over our investments if we wish. I did that last year and was told we were doing well but maybe being a bit too aggressive. The guy from Empower mentioned the same thing. We are an academic couple, both work at the same University, age 54 and 55. Net worth is $850,000 which includes our recently paid off very modest (cheap) house. So my question is: do we need a financial advisor? Is meeting once a year or so with Capstone good enough?

[maizefolk]

Typically the answer is that no, you don't need a financial advisor unless you either have a very complex business tax structure (sounds like you don't).

For most financial advisors the best case scenario is they'll give you roughly the same advice you'd get on this forum, perhaps a bit more biased towards bonds and away from stocks while taking a flat fee for providing that advice.

The worst case scenario is that they take a percentage of your portfolio each year as payment and then advise you to invest in complex funds that have high fees and, despite claims to the contrary, don't actually provide higher returns/less risk than simple index funds.

[use2betrix]

I had a call with them 7-8 years ago. They still call me every few months offering “free consultations.”

During the evaluation, they convinced me to diversify my portfolio more. So I did, into the areas they recommended.

It’s turned out to be a very poor decision, losing money over my previous investing strategy. Not a ton, but enough to annoy me.

I never hired them and did the change based off the initial consultation. When they call now, I like to remind them of this and that they have no liability if I make changes and lose money, yet still get paid. I’ve offered that if they are willing to absorb some of the losses if I hire them vs my current strategy, I’ll be happy to turn over my investing to them. They never seem very interested in that proposition, however.

[HeadedWest2029]

I had a friend who worked for Empower.  I told him I was a free rider by using the personal dashboard but not using their advisory services and he said "yeah, you're doing it right" haha

[Spiffy]

Thanks everybody. That's what I was thinking.

[Sandi_k]

If you want a quick consultation for not much money, HelloNectarine charges $150 flat fee for an hour with an advisor.