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Comment by deadeye | Hacker News Reader

As a former financial advisor, my advise is to find a one-time fee only financial advisor.

If anyone were to answer this question without you asking a bunch of questions first is doing you a great disservice.

Here are some factors:

1- how old are you? 2- what are your current debt situation? 3- what are your current investments? 4- what is your current income? 5- what is your current liabilities? 6- when do you plan to use this money? 7- is the 800k in some sort of inherited retirement plan like a ira or roth ira? 8- what is your current marginal tax bracket?

Etc, etc...

You'd be surprised how big of a mistake you can make here by doing the wrong thing.

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Second this (not a former financial advisor) Too safe can be just as bad as too risky. If you want to buy a house this year, sure keep it in cash. But if you want to still have this money 20 years from now, then you'd probably want to invest some of it. You don't need to do one thing with all of it, and a FA can help you understand your preferences and timelines to be smart with it.

1. 30s

2. House mortgage

3. 401k, some money for emergency fund floating around in index funds

4. 200k+

5. See 2.

6. My plan is just to secure minimal income for free. I could live off of 30k a year if I have no other expenses.

7. Cash from a house sale.

8. 24%

https://old.reddit.com/r/personalfinance/ might also be a good forum to ask the question anonymously.

As it stands now, I'm still bound by my license and can't recommend anything.

I assure you though, those are just the beginning of the relevant questions that need to be answered.

I believe what deadeye is suggesting here isn't necessarily that you need to share your answers, but that this is only an essential, introductory line of questions typically used when evaluating investment vehicles best suited to you — particularly when seeking qualified advice from a licensed professional. A lot of people end up in various depths of DIY wealth management before realizing they really don't know it all, and advisors dedicate years of their lives to licensing and continuing education on the matter. A large part of this is leveraging acceptable risk per-client/investor.

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