I just read a lot and understand the basics. In the broader sense it’s good to work out..
1. Retirement target
2. Assets target (house, car etc)
3. Decide on the ratio of Passive, Active RA vs fees.
4. Emergency fund (typical 3x monthly expenses).
5. Decide on discretionary savings/investment for retirement (excluding tax benefit), for assets, for risk(medical, currency, life, debt).
6. Death & Dependent costs (your funeral, dependent education, etc) which can be via a plan or discretionary savings/investment.
Problem in SA is the industry refuses to move on from the sales driven approach and in combination with modern advances and abundance of info available.. you can pretty much work out all the above & plot on excel to get a wholistic view on things.
Wrt you question.. a simple needs analysis which covers the above isn’t cutting it for me and usually is 80-99% of what the typical “financial advisors” have to offer. This why they getting taken out by robo advisors and DIY people as given the correct input, the advice dispensed is not worth it.
On the other hand, as your portfolio grows and your investments have a significant value(typically mid career assuming you started early), getting someone to structure correct products, investments, tax jurisdictions, etc wrt estate planning, etc all starts being worthwhile. <- but that’s like 1-5% of all advisors and typically they selling advice not products and also have fixed fees wrt time spent not % of investment.
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