<prompt> Human: Like the title says, Im 45-years old and my wife and I have 1,090,000 in our retirement accounts. Were very fortunate in that we have no debt. Barring a drastic change in my income we should be able to save 30,000year comfortably until my presumed retirement age of 65, but we will probably save more than that.We use a financial advisor and exclusively rely on him. His fee is 1 of the portfolio annually. Weve been with him for 7 or 8 years. I believe the average annual return weve gotten over that time is about 5.5 after adjusting for fees.I am not knowledgeable about investing at all. Playing with compound interest calculators, it is not wasted on me that a 1 difference over the next 20-years of retirement saving make a big difference to our final nest egg. Literally hundreds of thousands of dollars difference.Im posting because I am not sure that having the advisor manage our money would be any better than sticking our money in a couple or even one Vanguard index fun, like VFINX. Playing around with this Backtest Portfolio Asset Analyzer the returns typically average 10 or better assuming I dropped in a lump sum in Jan 2010, the contributed 1,000month through present. In fact, modeling a portfolio where all of our money is invested in VFINX, it almost doesnt matter what size of lump sum is put in or whether it was put in in 2006, or 2008 or 2010...the returns are invariably several points over 5.5.I could really use some guidance, because it feels like Im financially worse off for having our advisor manage our money, versus just sticking it in some index funds and all but forgetting about it.What am I missing?What are the right questions to ask my advisor?Thanks in advance.  <response>: To start : And honestly, yes, I believe that youll see more profits if you set up a sensible two- or threefund portfolio with index funds 1. index fund for US stocks, 2. index fund for US bonds small percentage and optionally 3. index fund for international stocks.You would:1. Need to spend some time on it to understand more about what youre doing, and to set it up2. Once youve set it up, annually need an hour or two to rebalance your portfolio3. Keep yourself from doing anything else so for example: sit tight and keep investing when the stock market tanks the next time or the time after that, or the time after that. 