Should you fire your financial advisor and manage your own money? For a lot of capable people the honest answer is yes — you were paying roughly 1% of your assets a year for stock picks a low-cost index fund delivers for almost nothing, and you can run the mechanics yourself. But here's the part nobody warns you about the day you sign the transfer forms: the fee wasn't only buying picks. It was quietly buying supervision — a second set of eyes with a calendar. Fire the advisor and you don't just cancel the fee; you leave that job vacant. You fired a conflicted professional and, without noticing, hired an unsupervised one: yourself. This is education, not personalized advice — but by the end you'll know exactly what went unstaffed, and how to staff it without hiring anyone back.
- Going DIY over a 1% advisor is often the right call — but the fee was never mostly for picking. It was buying supervision: a cadence, a rebalance, a written policy, a behavioral brake.
- On a $2.2M book, that fee is about $22,000 a year. Break it into the jobs it did and almost none of it was stock selection — it was oversight.
- The evidence that oversight matters is the behavior gap: over the decade to 2023, the average fund investor earned about 1.1 percentage points a year less than the funds they held — because of when they bought and sold, not what.
- When you fired the advisor, you almost certainly re-hired yourself for the picking and left the supervision unstaffed. Your reliability — not your ability — becomes the single point of failure.
- The fix isn't rehiring at 1%. It's governance: a written, enforced, weekly supervision layer you run over your own book. Keep the wheel and the savings; add the eyes.
Should you fire your financial advisor? First name what you're firing
I run my own money, including a leveraged book, and I've never handed it to anyone. So I've made this decision the way you're making it — not from a brochure. And the first thing I'd tell you is that the DIY instinct is usually right. The anti-Wall-Street writers you've probably been reading are correct that most retail advice is expensive relative to what it delivers, that a conflicted salesperson is worse than none, and that a disciplined individual can run a portfolio himself. Firing that person is not the mistake.
The mistake is thinking you fired one job when you actually fired two. An advisor does two very different things wearing one suit. One is selection — deciding what to own. The other is supervision — watching the book over time, on a schedule, and correcting it. You were right that you didn't need to pay 1% for selection. But selection was never where most of the value — or most of your risk — actually lived. Supervision was. And supervision is the job that silently goes unfilled the moment the relationship ends.
You fired the conflicted professional. Good. You just didn't notice that you also fired the only person whose literal job was to check your work — and you replaced him with nobody.
What a 1% fee actually buys: the six jobs that aren't picking
Let me make this concrete with real-shaped numbers. Say you have a $2,200,000 portfolio and you were paying a fairly standard 1% a year. That's $22,000 a year. It's tempting to frame that entirely as the cost of picks — but you can buy the picks themselves, in the form of broad low-cost index funds, for roughly 0.03%, a few hundred dollars on that balance. So the overwhelming majority of your $22,000 was never paying for selection at all. It was paying for a set of supervision jobs. Here's the honest itemization of what a decent, non-conflicted advisor actually does with that money — and, in the last column, what happened to each job the day you went DIY.
| The supervision job | What it actually did | After you fired them |
|---|---|---|
| An enforced review cadence | Sat you down every quarter whether markets were calm or scary — the calendar, not your mood, decided. | Vacant |
| Rebalancing back to target | Trimmed what had run and topped up what had lagged, so your risk stayed near your plan instead of drifting. | Vacant |
| A written policy | Kept an investment policy — your targets and rules on paper — so decisions were measured against something, not improvised. | Vacant |
| A behavioral brake | Talked you out of selling the bottom in March and chasing the top in a mania — the single most valuable thing they did. | Vacant |
| A documented audit trail | Recorded why each change was made, so a decision could be reconstructed a year later instead of half-remembered. | Vacant |
| Continuity & succession | Meant the process didn't live in one head — someone could step in if you were unavailable. | Vacant |
Read that last column again. When most people go DIY, they carefully re-hire themselves for the one job the fee was least about — watching the picks — and quietly leave all six supervision jobs unstaffed. That's not a knock on your intelligence. It's a structural gap nobody hands you a checklist for on the way out the door.
The unsupervised advisor: the behavior gap
If supervision were just paperwork, leaving it vacant wouldn't cost anything. It isn't, and it does. The cleanest evidence is what researchers call the behavior gap. Over the decade ended December 2023, Morningstar's Mind the Gap 2024 study found the average fund investor earned roughly 1.1 percentage points a year less than the very funds they owned — about 15% of the total return those funds produced — purely because of when they bought and sold. Same funds. Worse outcome. The gap was timing, not selection.
Two honest caveats travel with that number. It measures the average investor's dollar-weighted return against the fund's total return and attributes the difference to the timing of cash flows, and the precise magnitude has been debated by academics. But the direction is not seriously in dispute: unsupervised behavior — buying high, selling low, skipping the boring maintenance — reliably costs return. That is exactly the failure a good advisor's supervision was preventing. Take the supervisor away and replace him with nobody, and you inherit the gap.
The danger was never that your picks are bad. It's that once you fired the advisor, no one was left to check them — and the market bills you for that gap in basis points, quietly, every year.
To be fair to the profession: a genuinely good fiduciary advisor earns their keep here. Vanguard's own Advisor's Alpha research argues that much of an advisor's value is precisely this behavioral coaching — keeping a client in their seat through a crash. That's a real service, and if you know you won't supervise yourself, paying for it can be rational. The question this post is about is narrower: if you've decided to fire the advisor anyway, what do you put in the empty chair? The first thing to put in it is a written investment policy statement.
Your reliability is the single point of failure
Here's the reframe that matters. The risk in a DIY book isn't your ability — you're clearly capable, or you wouldn't be doing this. The risk is your reliability. A process that lives only in your head runs perfectly right up until the week you're traveling, distracted, sick, grieving, or simply bored of checking — and those are exactly the weeks that matter. You have become the single point of failure in your own operation: one tired human, no backup, no calendar forcing the issue, no second set of eyes to catch what you miss.
That's an uncomfortable thing to say out loud, but naming it is the whole unlock, because it points at a fix that has nothing to do with rehiring anyone. You don't need another person. You need to make the supervision external to your mood — written down and run on a cadence, so it happens on the weeks you don't feel like it. That is what an institution does, and it has a name.
I fired my financial advisor — now what?
The instinct at this point is binary: either white-knuckle it alone, or crawl back to a 1% advisor. There's a third move, and it's the one family offices have always used — governance. Governance is the supervision layer, unbundled from the person and rebuilt as a system: a written policy, a weekly cadence, and a short set of measurements you take on your own book whether or not you feel like it. You keep the wheel and the fee savings; you just stop leaving the passenger seat empty. The full definition is in the pillar on portfolio governance, and if you want to see it lined up against DIY, robo, and an RIA as a straight choice, that comparison lives in DIY, robo, RIA, or governance. Here the point is narrower: governance is what goes in the empty chair.
Concretely, it's three instruments run over your own book. Your allocation, measured against written targets — the framework I use is the Incomestead Stack — so allocation drift shows up as a number instead of a year-end surprise. Your margin, if you use any, read against fixed zones — Clear / Harvest / Freeze / Forced — instead of a raw utilization figure that tells you nothing; that's the job of the margin-as-a-weekly-tool discipline. And your cadence — proof you actually looked, on schedule, including the quiet weeks. Fuse those and you get a single honest number, the Governance Score, for how well you're supervising yourself. And because a jumpy Friday shouldn't trigger a panic, governance acts only on a persisted signal: the two-week persistence rule says a breach has to hold across two consecutive weekly snapshots before it drives an action. Tax and estate questions still belong with a CPA or attorney — governance covers the supervision of the book, not your return.
The Post-Advisor Supervision Checklist
Before you decide DIY is working, run this on your own setup. It takes about two minutes and it's meant to be a little uncomfortable — each honest "no" is one of the six vacant jobs, and it's the exact gap to close.
- Is your target allocation written down where you could show it to another person — or does it live in your head? If it's in your head, there's nothing to supervise against.
- Do you know your current drift from that target right now, as a number, without opening your accounts to guess?
- If you use margin, do you know your utilization and which zone it's in today — Clear, Harvest, Freeze, or Forced? "Roughly fine" is not a zone.
- Do you review on a set cadence, or only the last time you felt anxious? Reactive checking is not supervision; a calendar is.
- Could you reconstruct why you made your last three portfolio changes — from a record, not memory?
- If you were unavailable for a month, could someone else run your process from what's written down? If not, your process is you — the single point of failure.
Every "in my head / no / reactive" is one of the six jobs the advisor's fee used to cover — and one governance closes without the fee.
If you answered cleanly on all six, you may already be governing yourself informally — and you're the kind of DIY investor who never blows up. If you didn't, that's not a reason to run back to a 1% advisor. It's the empty chair, named. Fill it with a system, not a salary.
Frequently asked questions
Should I fire my financial advisor?
If you're paying around 1% mainly for stock selection and you're capable of running the mechanics, going DIY is often reasonable — the fee is large on seven figures and the picks are cheap to replicate. But separate the two jobs before you decide: the fee also buys supervision (a cadence, rebalancing, a written policy, a behavioral brake). Firing the advisor is fine; the mistake is leaving that supervision unstaffed afterward. There's no universal right answer — it depends on how disciplined and available you honestly are.
I fired my financial advisor — now what?
Rebuild the supervision the fee was quietly paying for, as a system instead of a person. Write down your target allocation, set a weekly or at least monthly review cadence you actually keep, measure your drift and (if you use it) your margin zone against those targets, and keep a short record of why you change things. That written, enforced layer is governance — it lets you keep DIY control and the fee savings while filling the oversight chair you just emptied.
Do I still need an advisor if I go DIY?
Not necessarily for supervision — that can be systematized. What a good fiduciary advisor still offers that's genuinely hard to self-supply is complex planning and a human brake on your worst behavioral moments; Vanguard's own research pegs much of an advisor's value there. If you know you won't hold your own line in a crash, that service can be worth paying for. If you will, you mainly need a governance process, not a person on a percentage.
Is a 1% advisor fee worth it?
Sometimes — an honest answer. On a $2.2M book, 1% is about $22,000 a year, and almost none of that is the cost of the picks themselves. You're really paying for supervision and coaching, so the question is whether you'll supply those yourself. If yes, the fee is expensive for what's left; if no, it may be cheap insurance against the behavior gap. Decide on the supervision, not the picks.
Do this next
The Weekly Governance Dispatch is the supervision habit, delivered: one short weekly note on running your own book like an institution — allocation, margin zones, cadence, and the single Governance Score that tells you how well you're watching your own work. It's how you replace the advisor's calendar with your own. Join the founding cohort and start getting it.
Firing your advisor can be exactly the right decision. Just be honest about what you're firing: not one job, but two — the picking you didn't need to pay for, and the supervision you did. The wealthy never leave that second job vacant; they hand it to a system that runs whether or not anyone's in the mood. If you have already made that call, here is the operating model that replaces what he was doing. You can do the same, keep your control, keep your $22,000, and stop being the single point of failure in your own estate. That's not rehiring anyone. It's finally supervising the one investor you can never fire — yourself.
Incomestead recommends. You decide.