&gt; One second - there are a few different meanings for &quot;financial advisers&quot;.<p>Not really. They all tell you how to invest your money, by definition.<p>&gt; A good adviser can help you to diversify your investments, help you to mitigate and control tax liability, help you match your risk profile to investments, etc. These are valuable things that the average person cannot do on their own, and they are worth paying for.<p>Yes, and the same information can be gotten from the Web for free. There are any number of advisory articles that describe personal strategies for efficient investment and financial management. The only exception I would make to this rule is tax accounting, which really is too complicated for the average person to manage on his own, and an activity fraught with risk (tax judges often refuse to accept ignorance as an excuse for tax mismanagement). But a tax accountant&#x27;s costs are easy to manage, compared to the erosive overall effect of a financial adviser.<p>&gt; However, even if I didn&#x27;t, sometimes it is worth paying for an financial trader to work on your behalf, for the same reasons as above, namely, you&#x27;d like to invest a bulk of money, but aren&#x27;t sure how best to invest it and want to diversify.<p>What? You just agreed with the uncontroversial advice to avoid financial advisers. I should add that many mainstream publications including the Wall Street Journal and others, and Warren Buffett, have given this same advice for decades, even (in Buffett&#x27;s case) to his own relatives.<p>As to &quot;diversify,&quot; what&#x27;s the point of diversifying if the point is to invest in index funds? An index fund is by definition a diversification -- that&#x27;s its purpose, its reason for existing.<p>&gt; I&#x27;d rather someone pay some small amount of money to financial advisers and actually invest money than be too scared to do any saving.<p>To a person with an IQ above 80, the truly scary prospect is to allow a financial adviser into your life and your portfolio.<p>&gt; I generally believe in a relatively efficient market, although I think you can get higher returns in some situations (e.g. some hedge funds do appear to get higher returns).<p>Yes, I agree -- about half of funds do better than the market indexes, and half do worse (and their ranking is random and unpredictable over time). Want to know why? Because that&#x27;s how the index is calculated -- based on the overall market. But once you include the adviser&#x27;s fees, you lose any advantage, and compound interest does the rest -- you end up way behind the buy &amp; hold investor, as explained in this article:<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;arachnoid.com&#x2F;equities_myths" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;arachnoid.com&#x2F;equities_myths</a>