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What are your income requirements? Say you use Vanguard's intermediate term tax-exempt bond fund, which currently yields 3.77%. If your numbers are accurate, this will generate $1.3M per year in tax-exempt income without touching your principal.
In designing any portfolio, you need to be aware of your need, ability and willingness to take risk. It seems that in your case, your low *need* to take risk should be the dominant factor. In that case, I'd recommend something like 80-90% in bonds -- probably split between short- to intermediate-term tax-exempt bonds and TIPS -- and 10-20% in equities -- split perhaps half and half between a US total stock market index fund and a total international fund.
A financial advisor is not necessarily a must. You'll need to educate yourself to understand what you need to look for in an advisor, and in so doing, you'll likely find that you know enough to feel comfortable handling the investments yourself. You should understand how your advisor gets paid, and how that fee structure may fail to align your fiscal interests with his. As many have indicated above, many financial advisors are nothing more than salesmen, and you need to be very careful about differentiating an advisor from a friend. I found "The Four Pillars of Investing" by William Bernstein and "The Bogleheads' Guide to Investing" by Taylor Larimore, Mel Lindauer and Michael LeBoeuf to be easy to understand and highly instructive introductions to investing that I'd strongly recommend.
I would also suggest trying out
http://www.diehardsforum.org for excellent financial advice.
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Great advice,... I believe these are the types of investments I am in right now while we figure out where to go next. I will check out your book recommendations this weekend.
If you don't mind me asking, what are TIPS? Pardon my ignorance but I am a history major lol.. Everything else you mentioned I am familiar with.
Most likely I am going to stick with my advisor b/c my family has used him for a long time but I would like to study investing a bit so that I can know when it is a good idea to add small amounts of risk to my portfolio.
My advisor makes the same points that you make... If i can make 1.3-1.5 million a year without touching the principle then what's the point of pushing the envelope?
I am thinking that 500-700k a year would be more then enough cash to reinvest the rest. Saving 700k-1 Mil a year would surely stay ahead of inflation as well, correct?
All that being said, I wouldn't mind making as much money as safely possible, which would then allow me to be more charitable with the proceeds.