Your own financial plan, before, between or alongside a financial adviser

Start with the wealth half, because it is the half people mean when they say advice is expensive. The regulator has measured this. In its December 2020 evaluation of the Retail Distribution Review, the FCA found average adviser charges of 2.4% of the amount invested for initial advice and 0.8% a year for ongoing advice. It also said that figure does not include the underlying product and portfolio charges, which averaged another 1.1% a year. Put together, the FCA's figure for the all-in annual cost of holistic advice was 1.9% a year.

At the FCA's average ongoing charge of 0.8%, a £250,000 portfolio costs around £2,000 a year in adviser fees alone, and a £500,000 one around £4,000. Those are our sums on the regulator's percentage, not the regulator's own worked example. A fee that scales with the portfolio suits a service built around managing one.

Checked on 30/07/2026, Unbiased quoted £100 to £350 an hour, £2,000 to £3,000 for initial advice on portfolios up to £100,000, and ongoing charges commonly between 0.5% and 1%.

The bigger problem for most households is not the price, it is access. Research published by the lang cat in 2025 found just under two thirds of advice firms operate a minimum asset requirement, and among firms that name a specific number the average was £276,000, with £100,000 the most common answer. Most of those firms said they would not flatly turn someone away, but a service designed around a quarter of a million pounds is not a service designed around a mortgage, two salaries and a childcare bill.

The FCA's Financial Lives survey, published in May 2025 from fieldwork to June 2024, found 8.6% of UK adults, about 4.6 million, had taken regulated financial advice in the previous 12 months, while 29%, about 15.8 million, had not but may have needed support. In December 2025 the FCA put it plainly: around 23 million consumers are currently underserved by the markets for advice and guidance, and the advice gap is real.

The same survey found 68% of adults would pay for advice if the costs were reasonable, but only 37% felt they understood what advice costs. Offered a hypothetical £100,000 windfall, 63% said they would make the decision themselves with no advice or guidance at all, up from 52% in 2020. Self-directed is not a fringe position. It is what most of the country is already doing, usually with a spreadsheet and a hope.

None of that means ordinary households never see an adviser. Most do, at some point, because the other half of the advice market works completely differently. When you buy a house, remortgage, or take out life cover, the adviser or broker who arranges it is usually paid by the lender or the insurer, not by you, or only partly by you. A mortgage broker typically receives a procuration fee from the lender when the mortgage completes, a small percentage of the loan; protection advice is typically paid by commission from the insurer. Both are legal and entirely normal. The 2012 ban on commission covered retail investment advice and never applied to mortgages or protection, and the FCA's own market data for 2024 shows commission is still the primary source of revenue in both: 77.4% of mortgage broking revenue and 82.6% of non-investment insurance distribution revenue.

The FCA requires the recommendation to be suitable for you whatever the fee behind it, and requires a mortgage broker to tell you commission is being paid, with the amount disclosed on the mortgage illustration.

This advice is built around an event. You meet the broker when you remortgage, and the advice starts and ends with the transaction. That is what it is for, and a good whole-of-market broker at remortgage time is usually well worth having. What the remortgage does to your household's cashflow three years from now is a separate question, and one you can answer from your own numbers.

On the right problems, advisers earn their money. Get regulated advice when the decision is complex, irreversible or heavily tax-driven: a defined benefit pension transfer, drawing an income from a large pot, choosing and managing investments, inheritance tax planning on a substantial estate, or anything where the sequence and the wrapper matter more than the arithmetic. Unbiased puts the average fixed fee for that work at around £8,550 for a defined benefit transfer, £6,700 for at-retirement advice on a £500,000 pot and £8,995 for inheritance tax planning on a £1m estate. Against the cost of getting any of those wrong, that is not expensive.

Advisers also do something no software does. Vanguard's Adviser's Alpha work, the most-quoted attempt to put a number on the value of advice, makes behavioural coaching, which mostly means stopping people selling at the bottom, the single largest component of its estimate that good advice can add up to or more than three percentage points of net return. Read that figure carefully: Vanguard says it is three percentage points over an unspecified period, not per year, and Vanguard is a fund manager estimating the value of the channel that sells its funds. Even discounted heavily, the behavioural point stands. People are terrible at holding their nerve, and a good adviser is worth paying to be the person who tells you to do nothing.

And satisfaction among people who do pay is high: the lang cat found 93% of those who had paid for advice found it helpful.

Put the two halves side by side and a pattern shows. Wealth advice is organised around a pot; mortgage and protection advice is organised around an event. Most households see an adviser at a moment. The years between the moments are where a household's finances are actually lived, and that is where a plan of your own does its work: before you take advice, between reviews, or alongside it.

A great many household decisions are not investment decisions at all. Should we overpay the mortgage or build the savings. What does one of us dropping to four days actually do to the next five years. Can we afford the bigger house, and what does it cost us in ten years if we buy it. When is this debt gone. Those are arithmetic and consequence, not product selection. You can answer them from your own numbers, and they are worth answering before you sit down with anyone.

And when you do sit down with someone, the plan can come too. From Settings you can share your forecast with your adviser, read only unless you switch on editing: they sign in with the email address you invited and see the figures you entered and the forecast built from them. Anything your partner has entered stays private, and you can stop sharing whenever you like. The meeting starts from your own numbers.

CrestCast is built for exactly that. It takes your household's real numbers, both incomes, joint and personal accounts, the mortgage, the debts, the children, and projects them forward as a three-way model: cashflow, profit and loss, and net worth, all reconciling to each other. You get the date each debt clears, the ability to log what really happened so the forecast re-reckons from it, and the option to save two versions of the plan and compare them side by side. One subscription covers the household, so both of you are looking at the same numbers.

That subscription is the whole business model. There are no tiers and no add-ons, and no bank, lender, insurer or fund manager pays us anything, so nothing in the forecast is shaped by where a fee might come from. It comes from you, and you can see the price.

One payment does leave, and it runs the opposite way to a commission. If somebody recommended CrestCast to you, we pay them a share of your subscription out of the price rather than on top of it, and the terms are published in full. Money we pay out afterwards reaches nothing at all, because the forecast is your own figures and it has never known how you found us.

The point of it is not a conclusion handed to you. It is knowing where your household is headed, and being the one who decides what to do about it.

Two versions of the plan, side by side

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Figures shown are the sample profile, not a real household.

If you want a sensible order to work through the decisions in the first place, the UK personal finance flowchart is a good free starting point, and pension or ISA first covers one of the questions people most often bring to an adviser.

Under the FCA Handbook, advice requires an element of opinion, in effect a recommendation as to a course of action. Simply giving information, without comment or a value judgment on its relevance to a decision you might make, is not advice. A personal recommendation goes further still: it concerns a particular investment and is either presented as suitable for you or based on a consideration of your circumstances.

CrestCast does none of that. It does not look at any particular investment, does not compare products, does not filter or select on your behalf, and never tells you what you should do. It shows you what your own numbers imply under assumptions you set. That is information about your money, which is why CrestCast is a planning tool and not a regulated adviser.

For free, impartial guidance backed by government, MoneyHelper is the right place to start, and the FCA Financial Services Register is where to check that anyone calling themselves an adviser actually is one.