I beat you! I guess that means you have to keep the score. (if you don't know what I'm talking about, read hole #2)

The question you might be asking yourself is whether or not you need a financial planner. Here's the bottom line. If you want to accumulate some money, or if you have accumulated some money and want to make sure that you don't run out of life before you run out of money. Then you need to have a financial plan.

Then you say "Sure, I can buy that. But can't I do it all by myself and possibly save some fees?"

That is an excellent question. Let's begin looking at it this way. If you want your investments to work as efficiently as they possibly can for you but you don't have the time, or the expertise, or the skill, or the knowledge, or the energy, then you are an excellent candidate for having someone help you.

"All right," you say, "but what about fees? I don't have a problem getting some help, but isn't that expensive? And won't that money that I am spending on my planner decrease my actual return?"

Again, another excellent question (You sure are asking tough questions for someone I've never golfed with before).

Let's tackle that question this way. I have the opinion that a good tax accountant makes up his own wage in the tax savings that he finds for you. For example, if I do my own taxes and decide that I should get a return of approximately $3000.00, and I have a tax accountant do my return and finds that I can receive back $4000.00, but he charges me $250.00 to do my taxes, am I not still up $750.00. Plus another thing to consider is that I don't have the headache of having to do my own taxes. Even if the accountant only discovers that I can get back $3250.00, it's still worth it to me. I am not really out of pocket any money and I didn't have to worry about anything, he took care of it all. So to go along with this idea in the financial markets, lets look at some statistics from the time period of 1984 - 1995. The average investor that invested in no-load equity funds (what I refer to as no-help funds) over that period of time received a cumulative return of 88.75%. Over the same time period the investors that were working with financial advisors received a cumulative return of 105.22%. The source for this information is from Dalbar Financial Services, 1995. So the question that I think is more realistic is "Can you afford not to be getting help from a financial advisor?"