I would also suggest reading William Bernstein's
The Four Pillars of Investing. Most of the content is indirectly available on the bogleheads.org site, either on the Wiki or buried in the forum threads. The book has the advantage of laying it all out in a logical manner. (I personally like Bernstein's prose, as I find it conversational yet informative.)
In particular, he has all kinds of information and stats on active management, and chances are you're more likely to do better with passive index investing.
I have gone with the fully self-directed approach using the recommendations from the bogleheads on the three funds for my service, plus a couple others that I have had from before. I also put all the money in the funds now. Left a little bit in cash.
Sounds like you're doing the right thing. Once you learn more, you
might find you want to "slice and dice" or tweak your asset allocation one way or the other. But even if you never have such an inclination, I think you're all but guaranteed to do better than with whatever active management your brokerage house was trying to sell you.
It seems to me you could end this conversation quickly if you define a super-simple benchmark allocation: say 65% S&P500 index and 35% total bond market. There's enough data out there that you could easily compute the returns for such a portfolio for the last 20 years. Take that to the potential active manager and say, "Show me how you've achieved superior results over the last 20 years, or the same results with lower volatility,
net of fees. Also, show me your last five years' tax returns so I can confirm you use your own investment management scheme."
No one's going to agree to that, of course. But I'm sure they'll have a 100 excuses to get around your questions.
Based on everything I've read, I think self-directed investing could be as simple as buying a Vangard target retirement fund, and auto-depositing into it as much as you can every month. Takes effectively no time or skill, and if you mostly forget about it, takes no will either. (Heavily equity-weighted portfolios
will go down, quite possibly by great amounts, over time. You arguably need willpower to stomach that.) Certainly you can do a little better with some time and effort, but you can also do a
lot worse with active management.