Are you qualified to be a DIY financial adviser? Answer these 3 questions to find out.

There’s no simple answer. Many do-it-yourselfers possess the knowledge and temperament to be their own financial planner. Others figure that even if they can handle financial planning and investment management on their own, they should still hire an expert. The benefit of enlisting a savvy outsider can outweigh the cost of paying for what you could do yourself.

“I equate it to the medical profession,” said Nathan Harness, director of financial planning at Texas A&M University. “Are there times you should visit the doctor? Absolutely. Are there other times you don’t need to? Sure. There are moments for Band-Aids and moments for surgery.”

Deciding whether you can bypass an adviser requires an honest self-assessment. You need to know your strengths and weaknesses. It helps if you’re well organized, intellectually curious and passionate about investing, retirement planning and managing risk.

These three questions can determine if you’re equipped to serve as your own adviser:

1. Do I have the depth of knowledge? You may track market moves daily and scrutinize tax-advantaged retirement vehicles with rigor. You’re a disciplined spender who sticks to a budget. And you understand the basics of investing, from asset allocation to compounding to diversification.

Better yet, you don’t need someone to tell you to draft a will and an advance directive. You’re aware of how much insurance to buy and how to shop for the best deals on it. If you have debt, you’re implementing a prudent plan to pay it off.

If this sounds like you, you’re way ahead of the game. The real question is whether you enjoy all the legwork that goes with the territory.

“Are you deeply interested in all of this?” said Harness, who’s also a certified financial planner. “Do you love doing it and learning about money?”

Even if you’re nodding your head, Harness raises another consideration. Individual investors with the necessary depth of knowledge may not know it all. They want to dig even deeper.

“An adviser can help you grow your own knowledge,” he said. “Education comes with the relationship. It’s not just about the adviser telling you what to do. It’s helping you understand how to do it and having an accountability partner. It propels your action toward reaching your long-term financial goals.”

2. Can I overcome emotional biases? Advisers often coach clients on how to avoid mental traps. Tapping the booming field of behavioral psychology, these advisers help investors resist negative constructs from anchoring bias (when investors take a slice of information and overvalue it so that they filter additional information through the lens of their anchor rather than with objectivity) to recency bias (unduly favoring recent data, such as concluding that if a stock just plummeted, it will continue to underperform well into the future).

“It’s the ability to remove yourself from emotional biases,” Harness said. “Most doctors go to other doctors so that they have someone from the outside with a ton of knowledge to provide some perspective. An adviser can remove some of the emotionally driven decisions” that can cause lasting harm to your financial health.

3. What’s my time worth? Retirees who love financial planning and investing have lots of time to indulge their passion. But for early- and mid-career professionals, the issue of whether to hire an adviser can boil down to a ticking clock. 

If tasks such as budgeting, estate planning and managing your portfolio are enjoyable activities during your downtime, then you’re more likely to succeed as your own adviser. But if you sigh whenever you sit down to review your latest brokerage account statement, that’s a bad sign.

“Do you want to hand it off to someone with specialized expertise who understands the complexities of financial markets?” Harness said. Or do you want to spend the time on becoming your own expert?

Some investors who are wealthy enough to consier alternative investments may wonder if it’s worth retaining a wealth manager to gain access to opportunities they cannot access on their own. For example, some advisers enable clients to invest in private equity, venture capital and products that derive income from farmland, real estate and infrastructure.

Advisers can provide a wider menu of investment products for high-net-worth clients, Harness says. But that alone isn’t a reason to hire them. Nowadays access to such products is easier to obtain. Individual investors can choose from an ever-expanding roster of esoteric alternatives to park their cash.

“The power of these investment products is limited,” Harness said. “I’d lean more on gaining the benefit of an adviser’s strategy, not their products.”

More: I have an IRA with $800,000 in it. Is a 1% fee to my financial adviser ‘reasonable’ to pay?

Also read: When the family wealth talk goes badly: One in four people regret having the conversation