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No. Everyone can manage their own finances on their own.
i think to answer this question adequately, it has to be specified…….does it mean advisors for government offices?
No they absolutely cannot. There are people, educated people. Who are living in their parents basement because they managed their own finances. Some type of advisement along the way. A bit of knowledge on what they were doing to themselves could have avoided a lot headache.
Can most people manage their own finances, yes. Can EVERYONE? No way.
Certainly people can manage their own money, but most people enter their adult lives with woefully poor knowledge of personal finance, much less things like investing or savings decisions. Even some of the most basic things like insurance are often set up incorrectly and losing people thousands of dollars per year (for example the property insurance commercials with vanishing deductibles… it should be vanishing payments, not vanishing deductibles, as most people do not need to make insurance claims and even if they do, they should be paying as little as possible for their insurance, where a low deductible makes it more expensive).
As we saw during the mortgage crisis, millions of people had bad mortgages, some with balloon payments or other NINJ loans. Most of this could have been avoided with minimal financial advice, someone to make sense of the mortgage contracts that were being issued in order to be chopped up and sold as mortgage derivatives and to say to the people getting the mortgage that they should think again (of course, that also went for the banks… so there's that too)
Considering a financial advisor could therefore be saving someone over their lifetime hundreds of thousands of dollars, avoiding bankruptcy filings, and so on, even before considering if they make positive investment choices for someone, I'd say they would be worth the money.
What does that have to do with the question? Are government offices any better or worse at managing their finances than private individuals? It would appear that some are, and that many are staffed with regular people who are just as ignorant of finance as the rest of the population.
If people would use a little common sense in their financial dealings, then there would be no real need for a financial advisor. However, since most of the general population lacks common sense . . . . . . .
Personally, I do not use one. However, since I do not wish to go to Federal Prison for income tax evasion, I have a tax advisor who is also does financial planning for those who need it.
Common sense isn't the problem.
The problem is a general and widespread ignorance of financial instruments, methods, and strategies. People cannot use common sense if they don't even know what collateral or leverage is, or how to read a mortgage contract, or what the different IRA/401k options they are given actually do (both now and as they retire), and so on.
My advice is that you to stop spending money on shit you can't afford. That will be $125.