After I sold my business last year, I looked around at various financial advisors and paid a fee-only one for what I hoped would be some advice, but nobody was willing to give any advice. They all just wanted to tell me about the various things I "could" do with the money but they all wanted me to ultimately decide what to do. They also wanted me to lay out my financial goals and plans in detail.
Okay, but I didn't have long term financial plans and specific goals and didn't want to have to come up with them NOW like they all insisted. Also I didn't know what I wanted to do so that's why I wanted to hire an advisor. So it was very frustrating that I couldn't get advice from them. Maybe it was just liability concerns on their part, but to me it wasn't worth the time and money, and some of the newer financial products I did learn about from them I could have found with a little research online.
I wonder if their profession has been "dumbed down" maybe because the vast majority of their customers don't understand even simple mathematics, statistics, and concepts like interest and inflation, so these "personal financial advisors" have their hands full just getting people to do the very basics like understanding they can't spend more than they have, staying within a budget, and putting money toward retirement. All of their standard presentations seemed to focus on that, and for me anyway spent way too much time trying to teach me the "powers of compounded interest" and what inflation was even though I politely told them I knew those things already (engineering and economics background, corporate finance, etc).
Maybe I just picked bad FA's though, who knows. I just don't see what value they add if you already know the basics and know how to research things yourself.