Financial advice: who can help, and what it costs

At one end sits financial information — explanation with no recommendation in it, the free layer that guides like Moneysmart (and pages like this one) provide. Moneysmart's guidance on choosing an adviser asks you to understand the difference between financial information, general advice and personal advice before you meet anyone, because the three sound alike and promise very different things.

General advice is a recommendation or opinion about a financial product that takes no account of your personal circumstances — Moneysmart's definition, and the trap is in the name: it can sound like guidance built for you while knowing nothing about you. Personal advice is the full service: recommendations tailored to your specific situation, delivered one-off or as ongoing support, by an adviser who must be authorised for the products they advise on and who documents what you're paying for.

The fourth service is the one people in trouble most often don't know exists: financial counselling — free, confidential help from skilled professionals at not-for-profit organisations, for anyone struggling with bills, fines and debts. A counsellor can assess your whole situation, work out options and negotiate with creditors, and Moneysmart is blunt about the price: financial counselling is free — you never need to pay. It's a different job from an adviser's: help for when money has gone wrong, not a plan for where to invest it.

Personal advice comes with a public paper trail, and it starts before any money moves. ASIC — the regulator — maintains the Financial Advisers Register, a searchable record of the people who can give personal advice on investments, superannuation and life insurance. Advisers providing personal advice on those products must appear on the register — so a name that isn't there is not a small warning sign, it's the whole warning.

The register shows where an adviser has worked, their qualifications and training, memberships of professional bodies, what products they can advise on — and any disciplinary actions against them, from bans and disqualifications to suspension orders. Behind every adviser sits a licensee: the business holding an Australian Financial Services (AFS) licence under which the adviser operates. Those businesses supply the register's information and are legally required to keep it accurate, and if someone selling advice isn't listed, ASIC's professional registers let you check whether their licensee holds a valid licence at all.

Do the checking before the first meeting, not after — the register searches by name, suburb or postcode, and a few minutes there settles what a polished website can't. Then read their Financial Services Guide (FSG) — the document, normally on their website, that sets out their services, their fees and any links to financial products. Moneysmart adds one modern warning: if you've clicked an ad, done an online quiz or handed over your details somewhere, you may be on a lead-generation list, and ASIC is concerned some lead-generation services in financial advice and super may expose consumers to a risk of significant losses. The person who calls you is not the same thing as the person you checked.

Moneysmart's costs guidance lists the shapes fees come in rather than a single price, because there isn't one: what you pay depends on how complex your situation is, the type of advice you need, whether the support is one-off or ongoing, and the adviser's own fee structure. The one-off shapes are a fee to prepare your Statement of Advice (SOA) — the document that sets out the recommendations — a fee to implement it, a fee to review the plan later, or simply an hourly rate.

Ongoing help has two very different shapes. An ongoing advice fee is a regular charge for personal advice with regular reviews and support — and the law keeps it on a short leash: you must give written consent each year to keep being charged, and you can end an ongoing fee arrangement at any time. An asset-based fee is a percentage of the total value of the assets in your portfolio, which means the dollar amount rises as your balance rises, whether or not the work does.

None of this is allowed to be a surprise. An adviser must explain their fees before you agree to anything; the FSG sets out services and fees; and the advice document itself should list every fee, who receives each one, and dollar amounts alongside any percentages. Two more lines deserve a highlighter: advisers may receive commissions on some insurance policies they recommend — for personal advice about insurance they need your consent to receive them — and the products the advice puts you into carry their own layer of platform, administration, establishment and investment-management fees on top of the advice bill.

Start from the situation, not the service. If the problem is bills you can't pay, fines, or debts stacking faster than income, a financial counsellor is the first call — free and confidential, and equipped to negotiate with the people you owe. The National Debt Helpline (1800 007 007) is the front door, its website runs a live chat, and Moneysmart's own line is worth taking literally: the earlier you get help, the more options you'll have. The free price tag is also the tell that separates real counselling from fee-charging debt-fix outfits — pair it with a repayment plan (Getting out of debt) and your lenders' hardship options (Hardship help).

If money is broadly fine but one decision is big — how to take super, restructuring insurance, an inheritance — that's the natural home of one-off personal advice, scoped to the decision. Advisers commonly specialise by product, life stage or client type (life insurance, retirement, business owners), first meetings usually cost nothing, and Moneysmart suggests meeting a few advisers to compare what they offer. Genuinely ongoing complexity is the different case: that's what ongoing arrangements with regular reviews are for, with the annual consent requirement working as a built-in moment to ask whether the service still earns its fee.

And when the question is just a question — how franking credits work, what an ETF actually holds — the free information layer exists precisely so you don't pay advice fees to learn mechanics. The last habit worth keeping is conflict-spotting: ask any adviser how they're paid, who else pays them, and why this product. Commissions and product links must be disclosed, but disclosed is not the same as absent — incentives shape recommendations everywhere, and advice is no exception (Hidden costs is this site's field guide to exactly that).