How to Break Up With Your Financial Advisor
23 Aug, 2026
“It’s not me, it’s you”
By all means, use a financial advisor if you want to. But don’t assume that you have to, or that you will make more money by doing so. You are perfectly capable of managing your own money, including investing.
I recently received some brilliant feedback from a woman who asked her financial advisor to sell down her investments with them and return the proceeds to her bank account. She was done with them, educated, and willing to invest her own money.
What surprised her most was how much she enjoyed managing all aspects of her own money. If someone had told her a few months earlier that she’d be excited about her personal finances, she said she would have laughed. She thought it would be dry and boring. She left her financial advisor and found managing her money motivating, empowering and, honestly, really fun.
For ordinary people with relatively straightforward finances, managing money does not require a financial advisor.
My point today is not that financial advisors are bad (although some certainly are); it’s that many of you don’t need one. We have been led to believe that we can’t manage our own money. We constantly hear the words “Seek financial advice.” But when doing so pushes you towards an entire financial industry that has developed around our fear of investing money, and is extremely profitable for those who work within it, I question the advice they give.
My own experience with financial advisors
I’ve engaged two financial advisors over the years.
One had extensive experience in the finance industry. Nice guy, super helpful, and he fully believed in the products he sold. They all do. He took the time to try to understand what Jonny and I wanted, even though I suspect we didn’t really know ourselves.
He set up our investments for us, but we had no clue to what extent he would profit from those transactions. Nor did we understand that the investments he chose for us were ones we could have directly invested in ourselves. In hindsight, our money ended up in actively managed investments, niche ETFs, and, despite our young ages at the time, balanced KiwiSaver funds.
The second financial advisor was unprepared and late to our meeting, which I now suspect was because he was fossicking around at the bottom of his Weet-Bix box looking for his financial advisor accreditation. It was kind of spectacular how hopeless he was. He moved to Australia. No brain drain involved, no loss to New Zealand, I suspect. These days, when I hear someone say “I’ve got my Level 5”*, I am not nearly as impressed as they would like me to be.
* They are referring to a New Zealand Certificate in Financial Services.
However, I’m forever grateful for that farcical meeting because I literally thought to myself:
“I am much more intelligent than this trained professional, and while I don’t have all the answers I seek at the moment, I can go and find them myself.”
That conversation was the permission I needed to trust my intellect and instincts and to make and manage our own wealth.
Jonny had also sought financial advice before we met. After we got together, married, and decided to use money he had invested as a house deposit, his advisors cautioned him against it for two reasons.
Firstly, he was selling a long-term investment, which they advised against. Secondly, his new girlfriend, now his wife, might be taking him for a financial ride. It was nice of them to care, and it is the job of a financial advisor to ask difficult questions. But hopefully, 25 years in, I’ve proved I’m not a gold digger.
And hindsight tells us he was right to sell that investment. It was actively managed and had a high fee, which they were doing quite nicely out of.
What am I getting at here? From all the interactions I’ve had over the years, I’ve had very mixed experiences with financial advisors, and I know from talking with others that you have too.
What I now understand clearly is this: They are a business. I am the customer.
Not all financial advice is bad
These days, knowing what I know now about our ability to invest in and manage our own money, I still have mixed feelings about financial advisors.
I have friends who are financial advisors who I genuinely believe work in the best interests of their clients. They love it when their clients show an interest and actively engage in their future plans, but equally, their clients might have zero interest in managing their own money. Or they may have so much money that the significant income their financial advisor earns from them doesn’t meaningfully detract from the life they want to live.
If both parties fully understand what each is getting out of the relationship, well, they are all adults. They can do whatever they like.
I’ve also met people who, without the use of a financial advisor, would potentially be in a worse financial position. A good advisor keeps them on a steady path and stops them from doing silly things.
There are three useful biological terms that I think describe this rather well:
Where one party benefits and the other is largely unaffected, that’s called commensalism.
Where one benefits at the other’s expense, that’s parasitism.
Where both parties benefit, that relationship is mutualism.
My point is that you need to work out what sort of relationship you have with your financial advisor.
What exactly are you paying for?
I think financial advisors would have a stronger case if they could guarantee you a return better than the average return of the share market over time. But they simply can’t. So how do they justify all the buying and selling they do, the fees they charge, the complexity of the investments they add to your portfolio, if they don’t ultimately make you better off than the average of the share market over time?
While I’ve seen some incredibly complex investment strategies created by an FA, I’ve also read about the trend of using index-tracking ETFs (which are cheaper to use) in a client's portfolio.
Which leads to one of my biggest issues: the vagueness around fees.
It can be incredibly difficult to work out what you are actually paying. They tend not to disclose their fees on their websites. In many cases, it’s not until you’ve fully engaged an advisor and received an annual review that you finally see, in real dollars, what they took from you in order to manage your money.
Seeing those charges, combined with learning a little about the financial independence community and its mantra of low fees, is often what shocks people into sitting up and taking notice. I hear from people who have handed over financial responsibility to an advisor that they’re increasingly uncomfortable with it, that their returns are poor, and that they can’t see a way out.
I’m here to tell you there is one.
You can break up with your financial advisor. It’s your money. You can take it back.
A title doesn't tell you everything
I have a lot of frank discussions with people. And I’ve certainly come across financial advisors who, one-on-one, don’t hide their desire to sell investment products, specific KiwiSaver funds, insurance, mortgages, and retirement plans that benefit them financially. Just think about it for a moment, if there were two similar investment products they could sell you, and one gave them a bigger commission, which would they take?
While it should be the case that they choose what is right for you, not them, just be aware that having the title of financial advisor does not automatically mean they put your financial needs above their own.
Also, know that they might be a one-trick pony who is only qualified to advise you on mortgages, insurance, KiwiSaver, or investments.
I’m a runner. I’m great at running for a couple of hours in my local hills, but I’d be hopeless in a 100 metre sprint. The same goes for financial advisors! They are not money gurus, and most only know their areas of expertise.
The Financial Markets Authority says all advisors must follow the Code of Professional Conduct for Financial Advice Services. Among other things, advisors must treat clients fairly, act with integrity, have competence, knowledge, and skill, give suitable advice, and make sure that advice is properly understood.
But not all advisors are created equal. If your financial advisor works for a particular bank, mortgage broker, or investment firm, you need to understand that they will only sell you their own products and/or those they are paid by others to recommend. When you see a business ‘helping’ you choose the right KiwiSaver fund for you, it will only direct you to providers who pay it to do so. Always ask, “What’s in it for them?”
MoneyHub has a useful article explaining what financial advisors are. If I were looking for financial advice, my preference would be an independent, fee-only advisor - someone I pay directly for their time and advice.
People often ask me if I know of any, but the problem is, they are incredibly rare.
I rang Nic Carr from Your Money Blueprint a while back and confirmed that he remains a fee-only independent financial advisor. And no, there is nothing in it for me in sharing his name. I asked if he knew of others operating in the same way. Sadly, he didn’t.
And there is a reason for that. It’s a tough way to make a living. A one-off fee for service, as opposed to ongoing payments over the entire length of the relationship.
Advice is not the same as management
Someone might benefit from paying an expert for a few hours of specialist advice. That does not mean that person needs the expert to manage their investments, at an ongoing cost, forever, if at all.
These are two very different things.
If you are using a financial advisor and fully understand what you’re paying, how your advisor is paid, what they do for you, how they benefit from the products they recommend, and what value you receive in return, knock yourself out. But if something about the arrangement is unsettling you, trust your instinct and start asking questions.
Because for most of us, the foundations of personal finance are pretty basic:
Know your net worth.
Understand what you earn and spend.
Keep an emergency fund.
Get rid of debt.
Contribute to KiwiSaver.
Invest regularly.
My Financial Independence Series of six blog posts is essentially built around teaching people that they can understand and manage these basics themselves, at no cost.
Keeping it simple is the secret
For me, managing money is not rocket science. Keeping it simple is our secret. And it’s not actually a secret because I say it all the time.
Even when you start layering life up (education, partners, houses, children, businesses), you can still keep your money simple. In my experience, people are often too quick to add complexity, and as a result, they think they need someone else to step in and take over.
Jonny and I still regularly take an overall look at our financial framework and strip out anything unnecessary. If we created a sinking fund for a specific purpose and that purpose no longer exists, we close the bank account. When we realised we didn’t want to own individual company shares, we sold them and reinvested the proceeds in investments we did want.
Even something as simple as both of us using the same KiwiSaver provider helps keep our money simple. If it’s good enough for one of us, why not two?
Investing has become far more accessible
You no longer need a financial advisor simply to access investments. Low-cost investment platforms like Smart, Kernel, InvestNow (and the higher-cost but still useful Sharesies), along with diversified index funds and ETFs, mean an ordinary Kiwi can set up an investment, automate contributions, and leave it alone. You can use Sharesight to monitor their performance.
I’m like a broken record on this: Learn how to buy and manage your own investments rather than hiring someone simply because the process initially feels intimidating.
Any new thing feels difficult the first time you do it. When we first started investing in an ETF with Smart, it felt daunting and confusing. Pretty quickly, it felt routine.
Gone are the days when you needed to have “a guy” to do your share trades for you. But the idea that someone else needs to buy and sell investments on your behalf has stuck around.
You can manage the entire buy, hold, and sell process yourself IF you keep your investing simple.
And therein lies another problem.
The investment industry has an incentive to make something relatively simple appear complicated, because complexity creates a perceived need for professional management. And an important point to make is that your FA genuinely believes they are right. Thinking you are right and being right are two different things, though. When someone makes something appear unnecessarily complicated, you should smell a rat. When someone talks down to you, walk away. If you come away from a conversation, email, annual plan, or review feeling confused rather than informed, dig deeper.
Taking the humans out of the picture
Another concern I have is relying on a very small financial advice firm to actively manage your money.
Perhaps it’s one person, a couple, or a small team managing your investments. Humans take holidays, get sick, have problems at home, have bad days, retire, and, importantly, form opinions about what the share market might do next. That creates a key-person risk I simply don’t want with my money. I’d rather invest in a low-cost, diversified total-world index fund and largely take humans out of the equation. It means my investment isn’t dependent on one advisor deciding what to buy or sell based on what they’ve just read or what they think might happen next.
And the evidence over long periods is pretty compelling: active management fails to beat passive management over time (SPIVA). Active management generally means more trading, more decisions, and higher costs, without necessarily making you more money. For me, that’s another very good reason to keep investing simple. This article, “S&P Indices Vs Active” by MoneyHub, gives a thorough explanation.
Listening to podcasts like Klooghless - The Long Con, the true tale of Dunedin Financial Advisor and fraudster Barry Kloogh, just keeps me thinking about the people who involve themselves in my financial life. A bad apple ruins the barrel.
Fees matter enormously
Paying an ongoing percentage of your wealth to your FA gets increasingly expensive as your portfolio grows, even though managing it may be no more complicated. If you’ve watched your financial advisor take hundreds of dollars a month - thousands of dollars a year - as payment for their services, and then at your annual review they tell you, “Steady as she goes, no need to make any changes to your portfolio,” I think it’s perfectly reasonable to ask, “What exactly am I paying you for?”
Those fees drain your future wealth because every dollar taken out is no longer invested and compounding for you, and with a financial advisor, there can be several layers of them. By investing yourself, you can eliminate many of those costs and keep more of your money working for you.
And remember, active managers tend to trade more, and every trade comes at a cost to you, without necessarily producing a better return.
A passive investor like myself can happily say, “I'm doing nothing this month.”
I’ve whittled down our investments to fewer funds, fewer decisions, and lower fees, and it's working well. Our net worth is increasing over time.
There is enormous value in knowing how your own money works
I want you to manage your own money because when you outsource everything, you risk never understanding what you own, what you're paying for, why you're invested in it, or how you'll eventually draw income from it. Financial literacy gives you confidence and makes you a better consumer if, one day, you feel you need professional help.
I can’t stress enough how having oversight of all your money gives you clarity and calm you wouldn’t believe. Knowing where your money is and how it is invested makes you feel in control; it helps you plan, and those plans help you hit your goals.
Sadly, I’ve met too many people using an advisor who honestly have no idea whether they are on track towards their goals. Again, what are you paying them for?
“But this is serious money now!”
Advertising can prey on uncertainty. Although it frustrates the heck out of me, I follow a tonne of finance content on Instagram. Firstly, they are all spruiking financial products (those housing companies are the absolute worst), both their own and someone else's, and secondly, the message becomes:
You've accumulated $500,000. Or $1 million. This is serious money now. Surely you need a professional?
My counterargument is: Why does having more money automatically make the underlying principles more complicated?
A larger balance in a simple, diversified ETF is still a simple, diversified portfolio. As our investment balances have grown over time, no part of me has ever thought, “Crikey, I’d better engage someone to manage this portfolio now.”
Heck no. Instead, I tell myself we’re on the right track. Just keep going. I don't see how paying someone to manage it would add value.
I can already hear someone saying: “Easy for you to say, Ruth. You've spent a decade learning about money.”
Yes - I’ve been learning. And I’m still learning. I wasn't born knowing this stuff either, and I started with $0. But from a young age, managing my money felt important to me. However, I didn't know what to do. I started, learned as I went, and stripped out complexity whenever I recognised it. When I engaged with anyone about my money, I was curious but sceptical, and I've pretty much always trusted my gut instinct, which has served me well.
When I outsourced our money to a financial advisor all those years ago, it never sat well with me. So when I eventually found the education I needed to manage it ourselves, we did.
I’m not an anti-financial advisor. I’m pro-financial literacy and pro-simplicity.
While some people do, many people don't need a financial advisor.
So, how do you actually break up with your financial advisor?
If you decide to break up with your financial advisor, expect some pushback.
Part of their job is to be concerned about your financial well-being. And, in my experience, a customer suddenly wanting to end the relationship can come as a bolt from the blue. But also remember, they are protecting and advocating for their own paycheque. Leaving them reduces their income, which may affect their personal finances. It’s no different than someone cutting back your hours of work and lowering your paycheque.
You don't have to tell them why you're leaving, but many people feel they do.
Particularly women, we are too nice.
From the stories I've heard, some advisors get quite the shock when they discover their clients have been moonlighting on the side with the financial independence community - reading books and blogs, listening to podcasts, taking online courses (looking at you, Rebel Finance School), and learning from people who strongly advocate for DIYing money.
Those resources give people the knowledge and confidence to realise that, as long as they have a pulse, they're perfectly capable of learning to manage and grow their own wealth.
Financial advisors are plugged into the investment advice industry, not necessarily the financial independence community. So when you announce that you're going DIY, they may genuinely worry that you've lost your freaking mind.
That's okay. You still don't have to convince them.
Your financial advisor works for you. It's your money; if you want it back, give them the directive to return it.
You can say: “It's not me, it's you.” Or perhaps slightly more businesslike: “Please sell down my investments and return the proceeds to my nominated bank account.”
You don't need to write an essay defending your decision.
Yes, I understand that your advisor may be a lovely person. They answered the phone when you rang. They replied to your emails. They may have sent you a Christmas card or taken you out for lunch. All of which you paid for, by the way, and those things can make a business relationship feel like friendship.
If you end your business relationship and they still take you out for coffee, that’s a friendship.
You don’t have to speak their language
If you sit down with your financial advisor and try to explain every financial step you're about to take with your own money, there is a reasonable chance you'll make a hash of the explanation, and maybe even struggle with their follow-up questions.
You might stumble over the answers, and suddenly you feel as though you're digging yourself into a deeper and deeper hole, demonstrating that you can't speak the financial jargon that is second nature to them.
And you begin wondering whether perhaps they're right and you're incapable of doing this after all.
Don't confuse an inability to speak financial-industry jargon with an inability to manage your own money. If you've reached the point of ending the business relationship, you've probably already put a whole lot of time and effort into learning, reading, and understanding what you want to do.
You may understand it perfectly well without being able to explain it beautifully to a financial professional. And that is okay. To this day, I struggle to articulate some financial concepts.
If you've done your research, you don't have to defend your decision. Again: It's your money.
And if your advisor is genuinely worried about you being financially worse off over time, I think you're perfectly entitled to consider how much their fees have already cost you over the years of your association. Right?
If you are about to begin working with a financial advisor, you are in charge. Work with them to manage your money and calculate the cost of doing so. Do not hand over financial responsibility to someone else and take little interest.
And if the time has come to break up with your financial advisor, keep it simple and make a clean, complete break. Learn where your money is going next before you move it. Be businesslike and clear when you give them your instructions.
You don't need their permission.
After all, it's not their money.
It's yours.
