The value of advice

There are some things in life you can’t put a value on aren’t there? Your health and your family are just two examples that spring to mind. And there are other things you know the value of instantly. One that might be seen as slap bang in the middle of these two scenarios, however, is the value of advice.

By advice, we don’t mean a friend offering you a few helpful words when your spouse is annoying you, we mean proper professional advice. In our case, that’s obviously professional financial advice. You know it’s something you need to pay for, but it’s not always obvious exactly whether the advice you receive is good value.

So, let’s look at what professional financial advice gives you as the consumer, and just what the actual value of that advice is.

Experience and knowledge

This is a biggie. Any financial advisor worth their salt will understand the market they work in and the products they recommend. They’ll be able to use their experience and knowledge to offer advice that’ll be most suitable and find products that do what you want them to.

Seeing the big picture

Of course, there’s more to financial advice than simply finding you the right product. To offer you real value, a decent financial advisor will look at your current situation and find out what your feelings are around taking a risk, so they can look at the big picture.

Helping you reach financial goals

Everyone has a financial goal, even if they’re not quite sure what it is. One way to test the value of any advice is how quickly, easily and efficiently that goal (or goals) can be reached.

In it for the long-term

A great way to value something is look at it how it performs over a long period of time. There’s evidence to show that financial advice is definitely very good value if this approach is followed. A study by the International Longevity Centre (ILC) with the support of Royal London, showed that Brits who took professional financial advice between 2001-2006 had an average increase of ‘£31,000 of pension wealth and over £16,000 extra in non-pension financial wealth’ over 10 years, compared to those who didn’t take any advice.

Is advice good value compared it to not getting advice?

Opting to do it yourself might mean you don’t have to pay an upfront fee, but you could miss out on much higher gains. Would you know what the most suitable products are out there or the most tax-efficient way to top up your pension, for example?

There’s also the time spent researching and reading to be taken into account too. And peace of mind. Trusting a professional with your finances won’t leave you wondering if you’ve done the right thing, as you’ll have all the facts and information to hand before you do anything.

So, is the vale of advice worth it? That’s for you to decide, but we’d certainly say so.