[maxtower]

Newt,
A financial advisor will almost certainly do worse than you could on your own in a few index funds. A lot of financial advisors get paid by directing you to loaded mutual funds or if they are buying individual stocks for you then they get paid by charging you a percentage (maybe 1) of your assets. These fees would put them in the hole against a low cost index fund right off the bat, and it would be very difficult to recover unless they got lucky or had some kind of real stock picking skill that Scorpion refers to. Unfortunately anyone with real stock picking skill would not be available to you unless you had a very high networth. Since they can beat the market, their only incentive to work for someone else would be to get access to larger amounts of money than they would otherwise have, increasing their returns. Basically financial planners are only out there to guide the "my mom" types of people who know they should invest, but are too scared to do it on their own and therefore are willing (or unknowingly do so) to pay someone else to do it for them.

If you invest in index funds across several different asset classes (stocks, bonds, real estate, foreign, maybe commodities) thats really all you can do, without spending a lot of time trying to pick stocks and hoping you are the one with the luck or skill who can beat the market.

Max