Early Retirement Extreme Forums

I only know how to invest in RE. My main issue isn't that I couldn't learn investing in other financials, it's just that I'm not wholly interested or passionate about it.
Does anyone here use an investment adviser to handle your investments? I have a guy that would charge 1% (does this sound reasonable?) of whatever was on management, and doesn't "sell" anything i.e. make a commission.
He primarily looks at bank preferred shares (Canada), REITs, ETF's, bonds, etc. He stays away from individual shares unless you want to add mostly growth.

At the moment I have a financial advisor with LPL Financial at 1% based on what he earns for me. Not sure if it was this forum or another that did the math on a 1% commission and the actual numbers were painful! I do this b/c I'm not yet confident that I have the knowledge/skills to do a good job with my money.
I'm learning thanks to this forum and others and when the time is right/I'm confident in my ability to take the lead I will transition from LPL and just run everything out of my Sharebuilder or Vanguard investment accounts. The LPL guy is good, despite his big dollar clients he always responds to an email within 48 business hours and listens to me ideas on investments (i.e. "when oil peaks this year, where is the best place to be to take advantage of this?").

Ill start the cascade of no's by saying that you will have to increase your SWR by each % point or fraction of that you pay someone else.
I suppose my advice if your not interested in taking it on yourself would be to use index funds to match your risk and timeline.

SWR = ?

Safe Withdrawal Rate
I think an advisor can earn their fee if you have issues (FIL uses one and they've helped him set up trusts, etc). If you're talking about regular long-term investing I think you'd do fine on your own. If you use someplace like vanguard you get plenty of index choices, good customer service, and a lot of bogleheads around to help you get started.
I actually think the people on the FIRE board at early-retirement.org have some good advice. Not quite as conservative as most standard advice and always with a long-term SWR in mind.

chris - you're the perfect candidate for a Vanguard index fund (or two). Save that 1% for lining your own pockets.

+1 ^^^
You could just use vanguard's Wellington or Wellesley funds.

Is all this available in Canada? I would consider myself an expert in RE, but not so much in anything else. Canadian RE has (in my mind) peaked out. I think I sold at the top, but only time will tell.
I parted with my main rental (closes in May). I'll have a large cash sum and need to convert it to some form of dividends over the months following in order not to consume my cash. I think I understand the basics of everything. On my RE I earned about 10% return, so I expect to have to take a bit (maybe a lot) of a pay-cut going forward? I may end up back in RE if prices adjust downward over the next 5-10 years. Might take that long in Canada as our RE is on a 13 year bull run.
I'll still have a triplex paid for which provides about $1500 a month minus about $300 or so in expenses where we live in one unit. I can live off this, but just barely. I'll have a fairly decent amount of cash to invest all at once after the sale.
So I'm basically looking at div producing income, although I'm young enough to try for some growth as well. I might try to find someone locally to sit down with who handles investments on their own and try to get started. Going from RE to "non-real" investments is worrying to me.

Absolutely avoid this for myself and my family. Fees and commission are to be avoided!

I just sold significant RE but am unsure about learning all the ins and outs of investing. I've done okay/well with RE but that was partly luck.

The tax implications of various investments and income streams are overwhelming. To me, it seems worthwhile to pay someone in order to avoid costly, stupid mistakes.

If you don't want to learn, you have to pay someone else to do it for you.
However, paying someone else to do it for you, does not guarantee any good results, at least not with investing. A friend of mine works at an investment company (or a rich people's portfolio management company), and they got sued two years ago when the markets crashed here. Sued for mismanagement of money. Now I don't know how that has ended (whether the judge thought it was mismanagement or just bad luck/the market) but it showed me that when you're rich, you can't just "give" your money to a company and let them handle it. Or actually, you can, but it means that if they lose your money, you have to accept that fact, too.
If you keep the matter in your own hands, you could of course still lose a lot of money, but you would have nobody else but yourself to blame; and perhaps you would have managed your money differently anyway.

Remember that most investment advisors, at least in the U.S., only have to pass a few shitty tests to be advisors. Thus, they are all more salesmen than investment gurus, and most don't know much more than you do. Most of the really good guys are hidden away behind high initial investment requirements ($500k or more just to get in the door) or in hedge funds. That being said there will always be a few good ones out there. However, I wouldn't hire one unless I had numerous first person recommendations and examples of what they did.
Also, it's not the best idea to hire an advisor who only invests your money in REITS, ETFs, and mutual funds. Any idiot can do that. Buy Fortune's and Money's investments for 2012 issues and you will get the same quality of advice for funds. Plus, then you wouldn't be paying that idiot's management fee and the funds management fee. A double hit makes a decent return almost impossible.

Picking an investment advisor who is worth the money may ultimately be more difficult than picking decent investments! (I have visions of would-be Bernie Madoffs.) And very few are geared towards advising an unconventional person who is not planning on working to age 60-something and then retiring.
Ultimately, monitoring your investments in retirement is going to be part of your life "job", just like cleaning the sink or taking out the trash. But you could always "try out" the proposed advisor by only giving them a portion of your funds to manage to see if you like what they are doing.
I like to read books about conventional retirement planning to see "where its at" these days and would recommend Charles Farrell's "Your Money Ratios -- 8 Simple Tools for Financial Security" (2010) if you are interested in seeing the type of advice you are likely to get from a conventional financial advisor. Although simplistic, its nicely broken down into actual numbers that you can apply to your situation.

IMO advisors are a waste of money.
I agree with Jacob that it's important to do some self-reflection to determine which investing strategy fits best with your personality and needs. Once you've done that, if you're uninterested in investing, I think it's OK to just put everything into a single low-cost mutual fund implementing whatever strategy you pick. For example if you decide on a dividend growth strategy you can just buy Vanguard Dividend Growth.
In the mean time my advice is to just put everything in cash or maybe a short term treasury bond fund. Don't do anything rash.

Thanks all. I'm reading this, and then reading some more. I grabbed about 10 books from the library. Not that it's going to help, but it's certainly wont hurt.
My other thought was to wait out a market correction then get back in on multiple buildings/properties with decent cashflow. One of the reasons I haven't bought in a long while is that the cashflows stopped making sense. I'm trying to avoid investing all in one place too though. At some point I'll need to pull the trigger.
One of my other thoughts was that I might still need to actually grow my money to live comfortably and one best way to do that is by using leverage and RE. Not sure if anyone is following, but CAN RE is though the roof right now. Certainly not sustainable. Over the summer, we should have a good idea if prices are stable or dropping and if I can live off what little cashflow I have remaining.
The idea about having a bit invested, rather than the full amount is reasonable. I could then just match the allocation on my own

If you are really good at RE, then stick with it. Keep your profits in cash or close to it until you find the right opportunities.
This -- believe it or not -- is the way professional poker players manage themselves. Only taking risks on the things they know and minimizing all risk elsewhere. At least the ones who survive.

Sounds good by me. I'll keep it for now and eventually will find something that works. Here are a few charts (in the blog article) of what sort of run-up we have had in RE in the last 13 years. I suppose that waiting 2 years might produce some really nice opportunities. I don't know if I should stay in cash that long....
http://www.greaterfool.ca/2012/01/08/in-the-end/

I was forced to have an investment adviser in my previous job's retirement plan. What I got was yearly face to face meeting (15 minutes) in which my risk profile was determined based on my age. My money was invested in about 30 different mutual funds based on my risk profile. After all the fees, I almost got the market return...
My advice: You can get the same market return with index funds. If you want to pay for the yearly feel good session, go ahead but don't expect to get any investment advice that would actually make you money.
Staying in cash until you find the right opportunity is the most difficult part in investing!

suggest a fee-based advisor if you are set on getting one. they may charge just a few hundred for a annual meeting or two. this may be much cheaper than a flat 1%, esp as you build assets.
most discount brokerages offer a fee-based service such as this. it is also peace of mind that usuall with fee-based services, the advisor does not profit from the advice.
recommend learning to manage it yourself for the long haul though. you could perhaps learn enough from the advisor to take over it yourself in awhile