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What exactly can a financial advisor do for me, and is it worth the money?
Technically, anyone who advises how you should spend or proportion your money is a financial adviser.  A person that does it for money is a Financial Advisor (difference in spelling). Financial Advisors are people that basically build, manage, or advise on your portfolio.  They have a little more institutional knowledge on how/where to invest, given your goals, since they do it on a daily basis. They may know a little more than you since, they deal with many different assets: stocks, ETFs, mutual funds, bonds, insurances (home/health/life), REITs, options, futures, LEAPS, etc. There is risk in everything you do, which is why what they propose is generally according to the risk-level you want to assume.  Since you're younger, your risk level could be a little higher, as you approach retirement, your risk level will be lower.  Risk level should be associated with how likely you're able to reacquire your assets if you lose it all as well as, your likelihood to enjoy the fruits from your investments. Financial Advisors are great, however, be careful about them.  Some are payed on commissions, which are given money for investing in packages that they support.  Basically, they could get paid $$ for putting you in a losing situation.  Also be careful because some announce that they are fee-based - these advisers often receive fees as well as commissions.  Basically, associate the term "commission" with "conflict-of-interest", so you want a fee-only Advisor, which isn't persuaded to steer you wrong. Another thing worth noting is that some trading companies (like e*trade) has financial services that may be free, depending how much money you have with them.  Generally, $50K is on the lower end to get a Financial Advisors.  There has been corruption in the past, where Financial Advisors are only given a limited number of accounts to manage, that means they took the lower-valued ones and basically ran them into the ground, so they could get newer ones from the lot that were hopefully worth more - the larger their portfolio, the more $$ they could make (higher fees or more commissions) and subjectively less work (less accounts to have to deal with), that's subjective, since the spread of the wealth was accross many markets.