I used AI three times before lunch today. Once to work through a regulatory filing, once to pull apart a document I did not want to read twice, once on a question about my own bookkeeping. Nearly every part of running this firm touches it somewhere.
So I am not going to build a case on it getting things wrong. Any argument that depends on today's technical limits will be wrong within a few years, or sooner, and I would rather make one that lasts.
Here is the concession as plainly as I can put it. The information part of financial advice is getting close to free. Tax treatment, Roth versus traditional, asset location, Social Security timing, scenario modeling, plan drafting. If the problem is that you need to know something, that is not what I would charge you for.
The arithmetic is real too. A planning fee of $5,000 a year, invested instead and earning 7%, could grow to roughly half a million dollars over thirty years. That number is the hurdle. It does not prove I am overpriced. It does mean that anyone asking what could possibly justify it is asking a reasonable question.
And there is a person for whom the answer is that nothing justifies it. Someone who knows which questions need asking, keeps accurate records, knows when an answer needs checking, understands how taxes and investments and insurance and cash flow move against each other, will implement, will monitor, and will not change the plan under pressure. That person, with a straightforward balance sheet, does not need an ongoing advisor. Trying to talk them out of it would weaken everything else I have to say.
The comparison is not the one people are making
The question usually gets framed as advisor against tool. I think that is wrong, including when advisors frame it that way.
The real comparison is running your own financial planning with very good tools against handing that job to someone else. AI has made the first option better. It is still the first option. Somebody has to decide what needs doing, gather the facts, judge which ones matter, connect the parts, act, revisit, and decide what deserves attention. Better tools change how hard that work is. They do not change whose job it is.
So the question was never whether you could do this yourself. With what is available now, many capable people could. The question is whether you want to own the job.
For anyone building wealth without an inherited playbook, there is a second layer to that choice. I will come back to it.
Every answer can be right and the plan can still be wrong. That gap is what I am accountable for.
I want to be careful about what that claims. Hiring me does not move the responsibility off you. You still supply the facts, approve the decisions, sign the return, and live with the outcome. I am not guaranteeing an outcome, and accountability does not mean absorbing the consequences of every decision. It does not mean a better return either. What it changes is who is answerable for the process.
What you are handing over
Four parts of the job. I am not claiming any of them is permanently beyond a machine. I am describing what I agree to be answerable for.
Someone owns the scope. A correct answer is not the same thing as a complete decision.
Take a benefits election. The high-deductible plan with a health savings account, or the traditional plan. That comparison is straightforward: premiums, the deductible, expected spending, and whatever your employer contributes. On paper, one plan may come out ahead.
What the arithmetic cannot ask is how your household behaves once the price of care becomes visible. A deductible you pay out of your own account changes how the ambiguous appointment gets decided, or the referral that could wait until next year. That is not a flaw in the comparison. It is something the comparison cannot reach. And the same account has a long-term use that has nothing to do with this year's spending, which never surfaces either, because the question was about this year.
There is nothing obvious to flag the problem. You can check arithmetic. You cannot check for a question that was never asked. A tool may get much better at finding the missing connection, and I expect it will. The harder part was never whether it can surface one. It is knowing whether you have considered enough to make the decision.
Someone owns what happens between decisions. Scope is about what belongs in a decision once it is in front of you. This is about who notices that a decision has appeared at all.
Your employer moves the retirement plan to a new provider. Everything transfers, the balance looks right, and your contribution rate resets to the plan default instead of what you had set. No letter arrives saying you are now saving less. You would have caught it immediately if you had looked, and you had no reason to look. Three years go by.
Nothing about that presented itself as a decision, so no question got asked, so no answer could help. (The same pattern plays out with recurring RSU vests.) Tools push notifications now and will push better ones. The open question is who has taken on the job of ruling on whether an event matters for this household, what else it touches, and what has to happen because of it.
Someone else can challenge the reasoning. You cannot test from a calm year how you will decide in a bad one, because the conditions that create the test also change the person taking it. In a real drop the portfolio is down, your industry is cutting, and your spouse's employer is in the same news cycle. And “I would not panic” does not answer that, because you don't get to rehearse it.
Economists Ulrike Malmendier and Stefan Nagel found that willingness to take financial risk is shaped substantially by the market conditions a person actually lived through, particularly in early adulthood. Your willingness to take risk can change with what you have lived through, which is worth knowing before you predict your own.
You can rephrase the question until a different answer arrives. Ask whether you should sell, get told to stay the course, then ask an hour later whether it is ever reasonable to reduce risk in a severe downturn, and the answer softens. Same person, same day, different permission.
What an advisor supplies is friction. A separate person who knows what you concluded when conditions were better, whose role is to challenge whether the facts changed or only the reasoning did.
In 2008 I was making decisions inside an equity research team. There was a process, portfolio managers asking why, and people close enough to see what I was missing and say so. In 2020 I was making them largely alone, from home, not working. I had twelve more years of experience the second time. I made a decision about my own money that I would not have made in 2008.
This is not a binding mechanism. You can overrule me and you can fire me. It is harder than rewording a question. That friction is part of the job I am describing.
Someone owes you a duty. That is different from a promise of good intentions because it creates an obligation you can hold me to.
Virginia regulation defines the fiduciary duty an investment adviser owes a client. My Form ADV is a public document describing how the firm operates and what it charges. My state registration can be revoked. A general-purpose consumer tool operates under terms of service. That will not always be the distinction, since AI delivered through a regulated firm may carry duties of its own. The question is whether anyone in the arrangement owes you one, and what happens if they fail it.
A duty does not make incentives disappear. Billing on assets under management gives me an economic reason to want those assets to stay under management. Offering flat-fee planning and hourly work changes that incentive. It does not eliminate it, and no compensation model does.
I chose fee-only because I did not want my compensation to depend on whether the person across from me bought a particular investment or insurance product.
Two reasons, not one
Most of the above is about wanting someone answerable for the parts of the job that otherwise go unowned.
The second reason is simpler. You may be entirely able to do this and not want it. Keeping a financial system current is real ongoing work: maintaining records, connecting decisions, revisiting things when conditions change, and noticing what moved.
People hire accountants with tax software on the shelf. The question was never only whether they could technically do it themselves.
What is different when you did not grow up around money
Some people grow up around money and absorb how financial decisions get made. Nobody sits them down and teaches it. They watch it happen over years, in their own house. Vocabulary. Examples of decisions being made. A sense of what requires professional review and what does not. An accountant the family already uses. A parent who has seen this particular thing before.
Without that, you carry a second burden on top of the first. You make the decision, and you also work out whether your way of making it is any good. Your taxes were straightforward, and then one year they were not, and there was no obvious sign that anything had changed. Someone with the inherited version of this has a parent or an accountant who says, this is the year you need someone to look at this. Without that, you cross the line and keep filing the same way, and the mistake is that the question changed.
The reasonable objection is that this is just another information problem, and a good tool can critique a process and tell you when to consult someone. I think the second burden is different. Growing up around this gives you a reference point for which decisions you should not be making alone. Without that reference, you are the one deciding when your own process needs challenging, and that requires already knowing this is one of the unusual ones.
The questions I knew to research, I researched. What I could not get was someone who had already made the same decision telling me which part of it usually goes wrong.
There was also a stretch where things were going well by any measure I could find and I still never felt settled, because I knew that if a decision went badly there was no one behind me. For me, a higher balance never resolved that. What was missing was a structure I could check my decisions against.
When you should not hire me
If your situation is straightforward and you want to run it yourself, run it yourself. The tools are good and getting better, and saying so costs me less than taking a fee to confirm what you already know.
If you want somebody answerable for whether the whole thing still holds together, or you would rather not own the job, that is what you are paying an advisor to do.
There is a reasonable way to test it. Build what you can. Then have it looked at by someone who did not build it. If the review keeps finding nothing and your situation does not need ongoing coordination, that tells you something real. If it surfaces things you did not know to test for, that tells you something too.
If you are working without an inherited playbook and want a structure to check your thinking against, that starts with a conversation.
D'Agaro Financial Advisory is a Registered Investment Adviser located in Virginia. Registration does not imply a certain level of skill or training. This content is for educational purposes only and is not tax, legal, or investment advice.