Someone I know in their late 20s recently told me they had just hired a financial advisor.

It caught my attention for a couple of reasons. For one, financial advisors are most often associated with people closer to retirement — you want to make sure your portfolio is optimized for when you step away from the workforce, providing enough income each year while taking an appropriate amount of risk. You also tend to have more assets when you’re older, and moving them around can complicate your tax situation pretty quickly.

Second, I wondered how much true value-add there is for somebody so young. When you still have over 30 years until retirement, it’s probably best to take a buy-and-hold approach and let the power of compounding do its magic.

If you’re just planning to stick money into something like an S&P 500 index fund and let it ride, is it worth paying a financial advisor to do that for you?

And then there’s the elephant in the room: AI. As recently as this year, investors have worried that the financial planning industry could be disrupted by the new technology. Why pay a financial advisor to tell you that you should have 5% of your portfolio in gold or 20% in international stocks if AI can make the same recommedation? Shares of firms like Raymond James and Intuit sank at the start of the year as investors asked themselves these questions.

However, two positives also immediately came to mind: a financial advisor can act as a safeguard for your portfolio, keeping you from panic-selling; and having a financial advisor shows you’re being proactive about your financial planning, a recipe for long-term success.

Wanting to dig deeper into the pros and cons of bringing on financial counsel at such a young age, I spoke with some experts on the topic.

Most of their points were in favor of having a financial advisor, but they did flag a couple of negatives to watch out for.

Let’s get into them.

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Why you should have a financial advisor in your 20s

One of the financial pros I spoke with was John Montgomery, founder and CEO of Bridgeway Capital Management.

Montgomery laid out just how inefficient the average investor can be with their money, and said having a financial advisor keeps you on a healthy track to growing wealth.

“Human nature is you chase hot returns, and when the market crashes, you think, ‘What was I thinking?’ and you sell. So you buy high and sell low,” Montgomery said. “There are studies that measure this, and the average person managing their own money in a brokerage account at Schwab destroys about 1.5%-plus a year doing this.”

Chris Chen, the founder of Insight Financial Strategists, added another reason financial advisors can add value to those in their 20s. While they may not yet have a lot of assets accumulated, they also have many major life events that could be on the way, like buying a house, getting married, and having kids.

So while the money you’re saving for retirement may be stashed away, you may also have money you’re saving that you intend to spend sooner, and different investing time horizons require different levels of risk that a financial planner can help you with.

Making sure your portfolio is properly balanced and diversified is another benefit, as is employing tax-savings strategies like harvesting losses, Chen said.

Financial advisors could also generally be better at their jobs than they were in the past, according to Ben McMillan, the chief investment officer at IDX Advisors. He works with financial advisors through IDX’s outsourced CIO business, and said he’s more inclined to recommend getting a financial advisor today than a decade ago, because he thinks the quality of their services has improved.

That’s in part because the 2008 and 2020 stock-market crashes wiped out financial advisors who were not good risk managers, he said. It’s also due to factors like roboadvisors and the popularity of index funds, which have forced financial advisors to compete for investors’ attention, he said.

“We routinely have conversations with financial advisors that are extremely sophisticated,” he said. “15, 20 years ago, that would have been one in a million from a financial advisor perspective, and now it seems like one out of two.”

McMillan also pointed out that the market has become flooded with new products, like thematic ETFs, over the last several years, and having a professional navigate that for you is a plus.

Potential negatives to watch out for

Chen said that it’s important to know which kind of advisor you’re working with.

For instance, an insurance agent who doubles as a financial advisor might have commission incentives to sell you certain products or put your money into certain mutual funds, he said. Fee-only advisors, meanwhile, are paid directly by the client and do not rely on commissions.

There’s also the risk of paying too much for a financial advisor’s services, which can eat into your long-term returns.

There are many different fee structures out there, but the average fee as a percentage of assets is around 1%, according to NerdWallet. Meanwhile, flat annual fees can range from $2,500 to $9,200 per year, the site said.

For a fee like 1%, investors should make sure they’re getting full service, said Bill Bengen, the creator of the 4% rule for retirement spending, who started his career as a financial advisor. An hourly fee may make more sense for a lot of people, he said.

“You want to be sure if you’re paying 1% that you’re getting more than just investment management services and allocation,” Bengen said. “You want to have tax efficiency. You want to have long-range financial planning in there. Your insurance needs. All that needs to be considered.”