How Many With $1Million+ Manage Own Money/File own Taxes

[Anonymous]

We are 50 years old and have about $2M in assets. I (the wife) manage all of our investments and do our taxes using Turbotax. Right now we only have one piece of property (our residence), one W-2 job and a small home business, but in the past we've had to file in two states, had an investment condo in another state, a rental house, and had to sell another property we owned.

It takes time, but the knowledge and insight I gain managing our own investments is very helpful in future planning. I do have an undergrad degree in finance and am good at math.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:
Except you and many like you have no idea if your advisor is doing well or not -- you are relying so heavily on salesmen that do you really understand what fees and expense ratios are being paid and after you pay them, are you actually beating the market??

Uh yeah, I do. We use a fee only advisor (not fee based), and their fee is directly billed to us. They detail out the other fees that the funds charge, which we weren't paying attention to prior to using them. We interviewed 4 different advisors (2 fee only, 1 fee based, and 1 traditional commission).

The reality is that the switches they made after we hired them offset more than half their annual fee in fund expenses alone. And we're better diversified now. It's not that we couldn't have done it ourselves, just that we weren't, and don't care to. I'm confident our $1M is going to become $2M and then beyond much faster since we're working with them than if we didn't have the couple thousand in expenses but we kept ignoring allocating and other decisions.

If people can and do do it themselves, that's the best way. But hiring a trustworthy fee only advisor is better than what we were doing, which was pouring money in but not spending any time thinking about where the real value is - the growth.

Who did you use and who else did you interview?

[Anonymous]

My husband does our taxes, financial advisor Nick does our IRA and a few other things then he tells my husband what index funds are doing well so we can turn a profit over for a few more dollars in our 401K. So far, Nick has done a good job. VERY good job. My husband meets with Nick regularly.

My husband is a numbers guy, he keeps all the finances straight. We just went over everything tonight. We good.

You don't need a million to get help with your money.

[Anonymous]

we do. personal investments of ~$2.5m (probably 45 different stocks in the portfolio). real estate holdings (including 2 rentals the DC market) ~$2.7m

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:My husband does our taxes, financial advisor Nick does our IRA and a few other things then he tells my husband what index funds are doing well so we can turn a profit over for a few more dollars in our 401K. So far, Nick has done a good job. VERY good job. My husband meets with Nick regularly.

My husband is a numbers guy, he keeps all the finances straight. We just went over everything tonight. We good.

You don't need a million to get help with your money.

Index funds are index funds. You don't need someone to tell you which ones are doing well. In the last couple of years, almost everyone has done a good job, not just Nick. You'd likely do just as good of a job investing in index funds yourself and keep the commission you are paying Nick to boot.