See what you need is an financial advisor 📈

Lately I’ve been spending a lot of time reading the Wall Street Journal, financial and investment books, YouTube videos on financial topics. Mostly because I have guilt about buying a Ford SuperDuty truck, even if I’m not getting a real-fancy trim. But the advertisers are on me, and they want me to know what I really need is to spend my money on a financial advisor.

Reminds me a lot of the fun house room that Better Help is, the mental health online counseling service who creepy tactics follow you around the Internet, and then speak to you in creepy voices late at night when you can’t get to sleep and you turn on a podcast to give your mind something to think about as sit their lying in bed. I did the licensed mental health counselor thing for five sessions, it’s was fine way to spend $125 bucks and mostly get balled out for my use of the word redneck or having an accusatory voice raised when you talk about eventually building that off-grid cabin, like you plan to be some kind of hermit. If anything I got out of those sessions is you shouldn’t being calling yourself mentally ill, unless of course you want to be mentally ill. Seeking professional help is a way to spend money, while not actually fixing your own problems.

There was a time when I was looking at buying a house and a homestead and considering the benefits of developing a relationship with a financial advisor to better understand the tax ramifications of selling off my investments. I had hoped that maybe a subject matter expert on investing could do two things for me:

1. Provide insight into the tax code and investing stragety beyond what I already knew
2. Allow me to see my own biases from an independent perspective

Those were the same things I was looking for with my licensed mental health professional, which he did to a certain degree, but also I realized the relationship was less beneficial as I hoped – he couldn’t just change me by telling me some magic words or giving me some drug. The world doesn’t work that way. Most of the things a financial advisor would tell me are likely things I already know or could find out from reading a book or internet research.

I am not saying an advisor of any sort is a bad thing, indeed both of those bullet points can be valuable for many people. Many people can benefit from mental health counseling and financial advise. But many others do not benefit from such services, especially when mental health counselors and financial advisors have a reason to push and obfuscate their services so people don’t realize they don’t need them as much as they are sold that they do need them.

Mental health counselors and financial advisors dewel on complexity. It’s in their advantage to make their products and explanations are complicated and hard to understand as possible for the layman. Even when a simple mental health issue or financial portfolio can be managed with simple products and concepts, it is really not in their benefit to sell simplicity. It is certainly not in their advantage to sell self-help, because that would mean you wouldn’t be buying their services.

Maybe at some point in the future I will give further thought to both mental health counseling or financial advising  – as those bullet points are valid. But I do think advisors often make things overly complicated for marginal benefits, and too often are focused on improving their business then helping the individuals that are coming to them for help.