I wonder if there’s a way to get your husband to see your point of view. I think your net worth calculation is right on. However, his point is valid too, in that he feels more security from super-liquid assets. It’s a tough difference in opinion. One’s assets are an important measure of financial health. I can sympathize with your plight, but I have no real solution.

Savings is a little more fluid — sometimes it can mean additions to your net worth in any form… but your husband seems to be defining it as rainy day savings or an emergency fund, which might be why he’s only counting cash/liquid assets. Ask your husband what he means by savings. Surely he can’t mean that all your savings for retirement should be in a high-interest savings account. Is your husband coming here and reading your entries and the comments?

“And he’s leery of real estate investing (as was a poster from July), something we’re interested in, so he may not be the guy for us. [...] He sang the same old song of long-term conservative investing being the best bet. Ho hum. (Not to mention, my husband has had his RRSPs in super-low-risk mutual funds for fifteen years [...] Are we expecting too much? Should all investments be self-directed? We are actually moving that way, and will soon consider ditching all mutual funds.”

I’m not a very positive person when it comes to real estate in general, but that aside I would caution you against real estate investing anyway (unless you mean REITs) since you’re, well, naive investors, and busy to boot. Landlording can be hard work at times, and usually you’re not diversified with it. When it goes well, everything’s fine, but if you screw it up you can lose big.

So what’s super-low-risk? Bond/money market funds (with high fees for the old advisor)? Principal protected notes? Did you have a diversified equity component? I’m a self-directed guy myself, and think you should probably go that way, but consider hiring a fee-only advisor to help guide you through it all. Also, I just want to make sure that you’re not going to overshoot getting away from your advisor funds to getting away from any kind of fund and going to active investing — you should probably read about passive/ETF investing.

Oh, and if you are going to go for a stock-heavy portfolio, make sure you can handle the risk — if you were managing your own money and saw the gyrations of the stock market over the last year, would that have given you a stroke or would you weather it ok?

Has your financial planner gone over your retirement plans with you? Knowing how much you will need and seeing your progress towards that should help a lot with figuring out where you are on the reasonable/bankruptcy scale.