I would say this in response to those who posted that "I should do it myself"
For the time I've used them AND for the foreseable future....(5-10 years?) I believe I'm probably fine with the status quo. The main reason is I just didn't have the interest in learning about all the ins and outs of doing it myself with everything else going on in our lives.
There are a lot of points here.
First - If you haven't learned the basics of investing, then you don't
really know whether you financial advisor is giving you any benefit at all. Yes, you had good growth last year. So, did everyone else with any appreciable equity allocation.
It is highly unlikely that you have some super duper FA who regularly beats the results you would get from a simple index portfolio of low cost Vanguard funds. At best, you might hope to get to someone who achieves the same results. The problem is, though, that you end up with less money than the self directed investor because you have to pay that fee.
The conundrum that ERD50 has regularly pointed out is that if you know enough to evaluate whether the FA does anything for you, then you know enough to do your own investing. If you don't know enough to do your own investing then you don't know enough to evaluate your FA.
Second - Despite what one might think from reading various publications, investing is one of those situation where less is more. That is, many of the most successful investors are those who buy a simple couch potato portfolio at low cost and then do nothing except occasionally rebalance.
Here are some examples:
Couch Potato Cookbook - AssetBuilder Inc., Registered Investment Advisor
In fact, you might compare how those portfolios did last year, with how your portfolio did. Remember, in comparing to those portfolios, to account for that 1% fee:
Lazy Portfolios - Couch Potato Portfolios - AssetBuilder Inc., Registered Investment Advisor
Three - How does your FA have you invested? Are you in single stocks? Are you in managed funds? Are they load or no load funds? Does the FA have you invested in something else? What fees are involved? If you can't answer all this pretty much from the top of your head then you don't really understand your investments.
Four - No one - absolutely no one - is going to care about your financial future more than you care about it. And, it is your life that will be affected profoundly by what happens with your investments. We aren't just talking about whether the cleaning lady failed to dust properly.