A self-directed alternative to a financial adviser

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 then said something most fee discussions skip over: 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.

Percentages are slippery, so convert them. 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. The point is not that the fee is outrageous. The point is that it is a fee that grows every year your money does, whether or not the work that year grew with it.

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.

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, 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 2025 UK study of adviser value put behavioural coaching, which mostly means stopping people selling at the bottom, at up to 200 basis points, 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. If you can get it, can afford it, and have a problem worth it, get 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, and you do not need to hand over a percentage of your assets to answer them.

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 pin 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.

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

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 pay to have answered.

This matters enough to be exact about. 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.