What you're saying is true of typical workers in the 20s and 30s, where the best advice is to put a part of their paycheck every month into an index fund. Howe

What you're saying is true of typical workers in the 20s and 30s, where the best advice is to put a part of their paycheck every month into an index fund. However, there are other situations. In our field, you can have plenty of situations where people have more money, for example: 1. You're an employee (or founder!) at a startup that had an exit event, you suddenly have lots of cash. 2. You've been saving up for a long time, you're now 50 and have considerable net worth. In these kinds of situations, the conventional wisdom isn't enough, because you probably shouldn't just sink $Xmil into index funds and be done with it: 1. You might want to diversify by e.g. not buying into one index fund, tracking one country, but rather will want a few different funds in different countries. 2. You might not live in the States, but you probably do want to buy an index fund that tracks american exchanges, not just your local ones. But then, you have to deal with fx risk. 3. You might want to not only own stocks, but put money into real estate as a diversification mechanism (and because it might have other desirable properties, e.g. might be anti-correlated with the general market in some situations, might give you depednable rental income, etc). 4. Especially in the example where you're older, index funds might be too volatile for you, considering you might be needing to pay for children's educations and other things Bottom line, there are lots of situations where you have higher net worth which lots of high tech employees eventually reach! And in those situations, there really isn't a one-size-fits-all policy of how to handle your money, and you usually do need advisers.