# 👨‍🍳 Pick your Poison

By [Let Them Eat Cake](https://paragraph.com/@ltecake) · 2022-06-18

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**TL,DR: There are three primary means of investing, all of which come with different pros and cons.**

**Professional Chef / Financial Advisor**

Like a professional chef, financial advisors, will take the time to understand what you want, and then find the products to meet your demands. You pay a premium for this service, sometimes up to 3% of the assets under management (the amount of money you give them to invest). Despite the premium, there is no guarantee that an advisor will choose the best products and grow your money the most, just like there is no guarantee that a meal at a restaurant will be better than something you can cook at home.

Financial advisors may make sense for people with a lot of money to invest but little time to understand investing, or little capacity to invest unemotionally. Advisors are also able to align product selection with an investor’s goals, and to help investors take advantage of tax laws.

**Meal Kits and Grocery Delivery / Roboadvisor**

Like a meal kit or grocery delivery app, roboadvisors can select products for you in exchange for a small fee. You will need to input some information, such as the general type of product you are looking for, age, risk tolerance, etc., while the app will take care of sourcing and buying investments into your portfolio. Despite the lack of human involvement, roboadvisors can make sophisticated and personalized investment decisions, and even help with tax loss harvesting (smart recycling).

Roboadvisors can benefit any investor- especially those with a medium or low net worth that can’t afford a financial advisor and don’t have time to develop an investment strategy on their own. 

**Old Fashioned Home Cooking / Investing directly on a brokerage platform**

Like buying your own groceries, DIY investing involves doing all of your own research and executing trades directly. Most brokerage platforms now offer free trading, which makes home cooking the cheapest way to buy and sell investment products. They offer other advantages as well, such as fractional share trading, which is akin to pricing by weight, rather than by whole products- allowing customers to purchase only what they need.

**Free Samples / Sign Up Deals**

Like free samples at the grocery store, financial advisors, roboadvisors, and brokerage platforms are all competing for your dollars, and will offer incentives to make this happen. They may offer $5 free just for creating an account, or $500 if you create an account and deposit $10,000. Some will focus on referalls, offering you $25 if you get your friends to join the platform. Sites like nerdwallet often publish articles highlighting the best deals at the time.

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*Originally published on [Let Them Eat Cake](https://paragraph.com/@ltecake/pick-your-poison)*