Most of my retirement funds are in a company sponsored 401(k) and a 457 through Fidelity. Fidelity can manage my retirement funds for a fee. Should I hire a CFP/money manager to manage my funds once I retire or use a similar service offered by Fidelity?

well CFPs offer more than just money management, if your looking for overall investment, tax, estate and holistic planning then go for a CFP

What kinda fee and what kinda service? If it's me, I'm rolling that over to a Vanguard acct and DIY.

Fidelity fee is .05% of your balance. They say they'll manage your funds, rebalance, etc. What they don't mention are the fees associated with the funds. The Vanguard option is more attractive from that standpoint.

I'm not certain I have the expertise to manage things going forward. Or, I'd rather worry about my next cold beer or fishing hole than the market.

TRD-Ferguson said:

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Fidelity fee is .05% of your balance. They say they'll manage your funds, rebalance, etc. What they don't mention are the fees associated with the funds. The Vanguard option is more attractive from that standpoint.

I'm not certain I have the expertise to manage things going forward. Or, I'd rather worry about my next cold beer or fishing hole than the market.

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First of all, you have an extra 0 in there. Their gross advisement fee is 0.5%. Quite the difference! You can use their robo service for .35% which I would opt for over the gross advisement fee. I've considered doing the latter but it's not worth it for my situation. See below.

Having said that, you can find a full service (investment advice, estate planning, etc.) FA for cheaper than .35% depending on your total balance being managed. I'm a huge fan of Fidelity and have most of our money with them outside of my wife's 401k, but I get more bang for buck from my FA vs using Fidelity for advisement.

Edit: I see that if you opt for their Team approach you can get fee down to .2% if you have balance of $2M or more. That's more intriguing now depending on what your full needs are.

The management will likely be easy once its it setup, but you will probably need to pay someone to set it for you then manage the rebalances unless you want to do all that research yourself.

If you can live on withdrawing 4% of the balance every year (i.e. 1million total now and living on 40k a year) you can easily just do a 70/30 split between FZROX and cash and rebalance to that ratio every year and probably never pay any fees and be fine.

If you want to have a more complicated plan that takes into account decreased spending over time and optimizing when to start taking social security, etc that is where a financial advisor adds value for the money you are paying them.