How much should you be charging for your Financial Planning?

How much should you be charging for your Financial Planning?

If there’s one question that I get asked more than any other, it’s this!

So, here’s the answer.

SOMETHING.

You should be charging SOMETHING for your FINANCIAL PLANNING service.

Not ‘NOTHING, because you’ll pay me SOMETHING for arranging products later.’

Not ‘SOMETHING that is bundled into another service.’

But ‘SOMETHING for your FINANCIAL PLANNING service.’

And if you’re still a little unsure of what I’m getting at, here’s the question I ask when I’m coaching Financial Planners through this.

Can you show me your standalone Financial Planning Service Contract, that your clients sign when they agree to your Financial Planning service?

Not your standard Terms of Regulated Business.

Not your overarching Client Agreement.

Not your IDD.

And, the range of answers that I get can be…

‘Well, we do it as part of an overarching service…it’s included in the product charges… we’ve started doing cashflow models as part of the meetings…’

So, let’s be honest here, in commercial terms…

If you’re doing it for free, in order to secure product business – you’re not charging for it.

If you’ve added it on to your existing service, but you’ve not increased the fee – you’re not charging for it.

If it’s included within the ‘product charges’ – you’re not charging for it.

You may be delivering it – but you’re not charging for it.

And if you’re not charging for it, although your clients may be receiving it, they’re not buying it.

Which is fair enough because you don’t value it enough to charge for it, so why should they?

If you’re struggling with this question in your own practice, it’s more of a confidence problem than a commercial one.

It’s not something you’re going to solve with a calculator and a legal document.

You’ll resolve this by working on your service to ensure it’s top-notch and by pitching it to your clients consistently until you can confidently demonstrate the value of what you are charging for.

There’s many Financial Planners that have made this journey.

In fact, I observed a chat in an IFA forum just last week where a group of Financial Planners had this very discussion and shared what each of them were charging for their upfront, standalone Financial Planning work.

It was great to see and probably wasn’t a conversation that would’ve happened 10 years ago.

They all had slightly different fees, but it didn’t matter because they’re all at different stages on their journey.

And this is the point.

If you’re charging NOTHING – start your journey by charging SOMETHING.

My first fee was £50.

But it was the best £50 I ever earned because for the first time, I was charging SOMETHING for the service that was providing the most value – and best of all, my client was BUYING it.

And in order to charge £50, like my peers in the discussion forum, we had to learn how to articulate the value. The more we did that, the more confident we became. The more confident we became, the more we increased the charge to reflect the value we were delivering.

Eventually, it will reach its own buoyancy point based on your confidence and ability to deliver.

But nobody starts out charging the fee they’re going to end up at.

It’s a journey, that’s got to start somewhere.

No matter how small the first step, the important thing is that you take it.

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