What is it like to get financial advice?

Financial advice is a nebulous thing to most people – but most advisers are just trying to help others achieve their financial goals, editor Edmund Greaves writes.

Have you ever had financial advice? I have, in a few different formats.

It is important to realise that financial advice isn’t something that the ultra-wealthy get and not something we all have access to in one way or another.

I’ve had advice on our mortgage (and we were very happy with the deal). I will have to go back in a couple years to get it again when our deal is up.

I was given advice on life insurance and income protection. Although my life insurance experience was disappointing at the time (although the adviser was excellent) – I do now how an income protection policy, which I was advised into.

These were good experiences in terms of the advice I felt I received. Unfortunately, I have also had one bad experience.

When I was much younger and getting started with my career as a freelance journalist, I was advised (admittedly informally) to not bother getting a pension.

This was bad advice and has almost certainly set back my future retirement plans by about four years, as it delayed my first pension pot starting until I got a full-time role in the UK in 2016.

Crucially, I did not know this was bad advice at the time – because the adviser was the exert and I was a graduate with absolutely no financial knowledge to speak of.

Fortunately, I now know better.

More from Edmund Greaves

Why advice matters

The industry on the whole – from mortgages to life and general financial advice – has come on considerably since those days.

The sector does suffer from a major problem with the advice gap. This gap is essentially the gulf between what financial advisers are permitted to offer and the minimum level at which giving that advice becomes commercially viable.

The Government and regulator are fortunately looking at the issue, but it remains to be seen what kind of fix we get.

I have recently begun a regular series of interviews with financial planners for Mouthy Money’s partner site Octo Members. You can catch the first edition of that with Smart Financial’s Kate Morgan on Mouthy Money.

Since I began (and we are still very much at the start) the sense I’ve gotten from the diverse range of planners is that these people have their clients at heart.

Yes, the process costs money – but they seem unanimously dedicated to the best outcomes for people who need help with their financial lives.

Importantly, it is about more than just bunging savings into particular pots and deciding what to invest in – planners look at a whole range of issues from inheritance to tax liability, planning for later life care and the longevity of a retirement plan.

Crucially, we want to showcase how financial planners think about their jobs and the roles they have to play in people’s lives – in order to better demystify the process and how it might be useful to normal people.

This forms a key part of Mouthy Money’s mission – to help people grow, protect and enjoy wealth no matter where they come from in life.

We’re going to be sharing these conversations first on Octo Members, but also here on Mouthy Money in order to get a better insight into what makes financial planners tick and why what they do matters to ordinary people. Stay tuned!

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