I feel the same way about taxes, medicine, and real-estate: there are professionals out there who are more baseline-skilled than I am, but there's absolutely no

I feel the same way about taxes, medicine, and real-estate: there are professionals out there who are more baseline-skilled than I am, but there's absolutely nobody on earth who cares about MY problems as much as I do. In the average professional-personal interaction, they are getting... 5% of the margin from their intervention? 10 at most? Whereas 90% of the benefit goes to me. So there's a VERY quick diminishing return to their time investment, in a way that is not true for me. Example: real estate agent. They get 3% of the cut, I get 97%. Should they spend 2x as much time to increase the sale price 20%? No, that's not efficient for them, but it IS worth it for me. If you're dealing with a professional who is MUCH more knowledgeable than you, it's worth it to take their advice, because they can do a better job. But at the margin, it's often worth investing the time to do deep research. Nobody will ever care about your problems as much as you do, and it shows.