July 2026
Featuring
Beau Wirick, Director of Financial Planning, Morton Wealth
Eric Selter, Executive Vice President, Morton Wealth
Questioning whether you really need a financial advisor is fair, especially right now. Index funds are easy to access, fees are low, and the last decade has rewarded the people who simply bought the market and held on. So what does an advisor actually do that you cannot?
Wealth Advisors Beau Wirick and Eric Selter have both heard this question for years, and in this episode of Financial Commute, they give an honest answer. Not every investor needs an advisor. But if your plan depends on making the right call twice, if you have never lived through a market that stayed underwater for ten years, or if you think you will just buy the dip when things go wrong, this conversation is going to challenge some assumptions worth examining.
0:00 – Cold open: do you really need a financial advisor if you can do it yourself?
0:51 – Welcome: Beau and Eric guest host The Financial Commute
1:35 – When does it actually make sense to go it alone?
2:47 – What happens to the DIY investor when the market drops 40%?
4:06 – Risk isn't about reward: it's about what you lose if you're wrong
4:52 – The retirement home story: goals matter more than performance numbers
6:12 – Blind faith in the market and the decade-long stretches where it doesn't come back
9:16 – The personal trainer analogy: you don't know what you don't know
10:33 – Why you only hear the highlight reels from DIY investors
11:11 – Advisors see the war stories: taking more risk than you need to is the real danger
12:09 – Lorne Morton's rule: thou shalt preserve capital
13:54 – Zero client calls during the 2025 correction: what real peace of mind looks like
16:02 – The late 90s case study: finding 12-16% yields while others chased AOL
17:04 – Why you can't truly do alternative investments yourself
17:21 – The fiduciary difference: no commissions, just what's best for the client
Do I really need a financial advisor if I can manage my own investments?
It depends on what you are actually trying to do. If you want simple, low-cost index fund exposure and you have the discipline to hold through volatility without acting on emotion, you may not need an advisor for that piece. But if you need help figuring out how much to save, when you can retire, how to manage risk as you age, or how to access investments outside of stocks and bonds, the complexity grows quickly. Beau and Eric are honest that the question is legitimate. Their answer is equally honest about where the limits of the do-it-yourself approach start to show.
What does a financial advisor actually do that I cannot do myself?
Several things that are harder to replicate on your own. An advisor brings experience across multiple market cycles, including the ones that have not happened yet in your investing life. They design portfolios around your goals rather than around maximizing returns. They are a behavioral check when markets go against you and emotion starts to drive decisions. And they can access investment strategies, including alternatives, that most individual investors cannot reach on their own.
Is the stock market always a good long-term investment?
Historically, yes. But the word long-term is doing a lot of work in that sentence. Between 2000 and 2013, US stocks effectively went nowhere for thirteen years in nominal terms and lost purchasing power in real terms after accounting for inflation. Between 1968 and 1982, a similar pattern played out. Investors who needed their money during those windows, or who had to sell during the drawdowns, did not get to wait for the recovery. Beau describes the widespread belief that the market always comes back as a form of blind faith rather than informed investing.
What is the risk of trying to buy the dip when the market crashes?
The plan sounds rational until the conditions that caused the crash also affect your income and cash reserves. In 2008, the market fell nearly 60 percent from top to bottom, and a large number of people who intended to buy the dip lost their jobs at the same time. They did not have the liquidity to act. Beau also notes that leverage makes this scenario worse: investors who borrowed money to buy more stocks going into a crash can end up far underwater, with no path back to even.
What does it mean to preserve capital, and why does it matter?
Morton Wealth founder Lon Morton's foundational principle was thou shalt preserve capital. The logic is mathematical. If you start with $100 and lose 20 percent, you are at $80. To get back to $100, you need a 25 percent gain, not 20. The losses are always harder to recover from than they look going in. Beau points out that Warren Buffett's two rules of investing say essentially the same thing: rule one is do not lose money, rule two is do not forget rule one. Downside protection is not timid investing. It is rational investing.
Can I invest in alternatives on my own?
For most investors, not meaningfully. Alternative investments, which include things like private credit, private real estate funds, and other strategies that operate outside of the public stock and bond markets, typically require minimum investment thresholds, accreditation, and expertise to evaluate properly. Beau's point in the episode is that the ability to build a truly diversified portfolio that includes alternatives is one of the areas where working with an advisor provides access that most individuals simply cannot replicate on their own.
The do-it-yourself investing conversation is genuinely more compelling than it was twenty years ago. Costs are lower, access is broader, and the last decade has rewarded passive strategies generously. This episode does not dismiss that. What it does is lay out the specific conditions under which the DIY approach has historically broken down, and why those conditions may be closer than they appear in a market running near all-time highs.
At Morton Wealth, we think the question of whether you need an advisor is worth answering honestly rather than defensively. If you are in a season of your investing life where the stakes are high and the margin for error is narrowing, that is worth a conversation.
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