Getting financial advice
Should you get financial advice?
Well that all depends! If you have no savings behind you then is budget advice you need not financial advice. the difference between the two is that a budget advisor and teach you how to manage your money in order to live within your means while a financial advisor will advise you where to invest your savings.
You do not need to be cashed up in order to need financial advice. If you are just joining kiwisaver then you need advise on which fund to invest in and that is not something that you should be getting advice from some random person. Your bank or whoever your kiwisaver provider will provide to best information for you.
Financial advice of an any kind should never be a substitute for gaining financial literacy. If you have the discipline to save your money then the sense to put that money to work for you then it is your responsibility to decide on how to invest it. Some people ask for advice on financial matters only because they want someone to blame if things turn to custard.
During the Global Financial Crisis of 2007 there were a number of Financial companies that went bellyup and many people lost everything they had. The saddest part is that some had their entire life savings invested in the one company. Now I do not know where they got their financial advice from but I always thought that sensible investor knows that you do not place all of your eggs in the one basket. These people who lost their retirement savings must have been quite intelligent in order to have accumulated such a large investment portfolio but they were financially dumb or greedy, or both. What they were doing was similar to someone going to the races with a sum of money and betting all of their bank roll on the one horse.
I think someone who decides to place all of their eggs in the one basket really needs to take full responsibility for their own decisions and not blame others even if they did take advice that turned out to bad. After all it is your money and if you have decided to remain financially ignorant because you are too lazy to get yourself financially educated by reading different books on finance then you really have only yourself to blame if someone who made your choices for you turned out to make the wrong ones.