Working with a fiduciary advisor is the best thing to do.
These people scare me and I'll tell you why. It is a long story but, I think, worth the read to understand the industry.
When I was in my final quarter at Ohio State I was getting myself a Real Estate Major to add on to my Accounting and Finance Majors. One of the classes I needed for it was an appraisal class.
Everyone thinks of Ohio State as humongous and it is but the Real Estate major within the Business College is (or at least was 25 years ago) very small, like about a dozen graduates per year, REALLY small. I was in my final quarter at Ohio State so I literally knew EVERYONE in the Real Estate program. The appraisal class was only offered a night because the instructor was a working appraiser who wasn't available during the day and when I showed up there were ~40 people in the class and I only knew a handful. That surprised me because, as I said above, I knew literally everyone in the RE program and I didn't know until then that this class was also offered for an alternative purpose.
The professor was one of those guys who has everyone introduce themselves on the first day and as we went around the small number of people that I knew were, of course, Real Estate majors. The rest were all in the Arts College majoring in something called "Personal Finance". We (the small group of Business College Real Estate Majors) couldn't understand why the Arts College would offer a "Personal Finance" Major and why anyone would pursue it when you could get a lot more financial knowledge in ANY major in the Business College. One of my group finally asked: "What the heck is a Personal Finance Major?" One of them answered that it was "A business major for people who weren't smart enough to get into the Business College." Several of his colleagues vociferously objected to that characterization but over the course of the class we (business majors) learned that it was very much true.
Some of the appraisals were of income property (rentals) so we had to do the calculations to discount future cash flows. For those of us from the Business College this was standard stuff and the problems presented in the class were ludicrously easy. I kid you not, none of the Arts College "Personal Finance" Majors could grasp the concept. To them it might as well have been presented in Greek. We (Business Majors) tried to explain it to them but to no avail. They just couldn't understand it.
The reason I shared this whole long story is that at some point during the class one of us (Business Majors) asked what the Arts College people planned to do with their Bachelor of Arts in Personal Finance Degrees and they all said that they would be stock brokers and financial planners. We were aghast. These people couldn't comprehend simple cash flow valuation concepts and THEY were going to advise others about finances.
The above is
@medinabuckeye1 's warning to be VERY careful about trusting stockbrokers and financial planners because they might not know or even have any clue of WTF they are talking about.
