Ask most people whether they have a financial plan and they'll point to a pension and an ISA. But saving into products isn't the same as having a plan, says rockwealth partner Ed Blackett. Understanding the difference between a financial planner and a financial adviser may be the most useful thing you ever learn about your money.
Many people believe their finances are already sorted. They've got a pension. They've probably got an ISA. Maybe a few investments tucked away somewhere. And because those things are sensible, and because they've been diligent about paying into them, they assume the job is done.
It isn't. Products are the building blocks. They aren't the plan.
The person best placed to explain that distinction is someone who spent the first part of his career on the other side of it. Ed Blackett, a partner and financial planner at rockwealth Cheltenham, started out selling pensions and ISAs before he learned to build plans around the people who held them.
'A financial planner is far less transactional,' he says. 'When I first started out, it would be more a focus on selling a pension or an investment or an ISA or a product. Now, a planner's role is maybe to use those products, but it's not the focus. The focus is the client and the plan.'
That gap, between being sold to and being planned for, is what the financial planner vs financial adviser distinction really comes down to. The labels matter less than what sits behind them. Many people called advisers also provide financial planning, and the title on the business card guarantees nothing either way. What you're really reading is the approach: is this person reaching for a product, or building you a plan? And most people can't tell which one they're dealing with. They know they're supposed to be wary of advisers. They've read the stories. But wariness isn't the same as knowing what good looks like, and it's hard to spot a sales pitch when it turns up dressed as advice.
The warning signs that you're being sold to
An adviser who's selling rather than planning tends to give themselves away, and once you know what to listen for, the tell is hard to miss.
Ed names three. The first is a product or investment that only this particular adviser seems able to get you into, the sort of thing pitched as a special opportunity you won't find anywhere else. The second is being hurried, the meeting that keeps steering towards a decision before you've had time to think it over. The third is manufactured scarcity: the offer that's closing soon, the fund that's about to be capped, the rate you'll miss if you don't commit this week.
'Warning signs to look out for could be a planner suggesting a product or investment that they only have access to, or that they're rushing you into, or saying there's limited availability,' says Ed. 'A financial plan should always be done with care, in a time that is suitable for you, and not rushed ever.'
Before joining rockwealth, Ed spent 14 years at a chartered firm where, in his words, he 'saw the mistakes that were made'. He names them from the inside, not from a textbook.
None of which means the industry is rotten. It mostly isn't. When the Financial Conduct Authority looked into whether the largest advice firms were delivering the ongoing service their clients paid for, it found that suitability reviews had been carried out in around 83 per cent of cases. It didn't find a systemic problem. What it did say was that firms must be able to evidence the service they charge for, and put things right where they couldn't.
The most prominent case of a firm falling short put a number on it. In early 2024, alongside its results for 2023, St James's Place set aside £426 million to refund clients who had paid for an ongoing service there was no evidence they'd received.
The lesson isn't that everyone's at it. It's that paying for advice and receiving it aren't guaranteed to be the same thing.
Why a financial planner and a financial adviser aren't the same thing
Those warning signs exist because of a difference in the job itself. A salesperson's work is finished the moment the product is sold. A planner's work starts with understanding what you're trying to achieve, and only then reaches for the products that might help you get there.
'I don't view what we do as a sales job,' says Ed. 'It's more about being a service industry.' The days when an adviser was simply asked to arrange an ISA or a pension are, as he sees it, long gone, to the point where rockwealth will push back when someone walks in asking for a product rather than a plan.
That can sound counterintuitive. Plenty of people arrive wanting exactly that: sort my pension, set up the ISA, job done. The pushback isn't stubbornness for its own sake. Arranging a product without understanding the life it's meant to serve is how people end up with a drawer full of sensible-looking arrangements that don't add up to anything.
Good planning runs the other way round. 'Education should sit at the front,' Ed says, 'and then the advice and the planning comes off the back of it.'.
So what does planning actually deliver? Two things. It brings the pieces together in the right order, and, on the evidence, it leaves people better off.
Start with the order. A plan pulls your pension, ISAs, other investments, tax and timing into a single view, then sequences the decisions so the right thing happens at the right moment, and keeps pace as allowances and legislation change.
What a financial plan actually buys you
Take something as ordinary as deciding which pot to draw on first in retirement. Say you need a steady income and you have a pension, an ISA and a general investment account to take it from. Draw them down in one order and more of your income is exposed to tax, and the money runs down faster. Draw them in another, coordinating each withdrawal with your allowances and tax bands, and the same income can leave you with a smaller tax bill and a pot that lasts longer. Nothing about your circumstances has changed. Only the sequencing has. That's an illustrative example, not a recommendation, but it's the kind of question a plan answers and a product sale never thinks to ask.
Then there's the investing itself, where Ed is at his most pointed. 'Clients don't like the feeling that an adviser is claiming to have the crystal ball that's going to provide superior returns,' he says, 'because they've made a decision based on something that could be quite flimsy.' Evidence-based investing reassures precisely because it drops that pretence. Nobody's promising to outguess the market.
The data is on his side. Over the ten years to mid-2025, around 94 per cent of sterling-denominated global equity funds underperformed the S&P World Index, according to the SPIVA Europe Mid-Year 2025 scorecard. The stock-picking story, the one that justifies the higher fee and the confident forecast, fails far more often than it works.
Planning has a measurable value of its own. Research by the International Longevity Centre and Royal London found that people who took financial advice were, on average, £47,706 better off across their pensions and other financial assets a decade later than a similar group who took none. It's a 2019 study, it measures advice in general rather than planning specifically, and it points to no one firm, so treat it as a signpost rather than a guarantee. But the gains it found came largely from the things planning is built to get right: encouraging people to save, to invest rather than leave money sitting in cash, and to keep at it for the long term. It puts a number on something people often treat as unmeasurable: the cost of going it alone.
Which is really Ed's point. 'A lot of people get most of the way there on their own, but they need advice for the final stretch, rather than settle for 75 per cent of the life they should have had.' If you reckon you're doing fine on your own, that's the question worth sitting with. Doing fine might be 75 per cent. You'd never know unless someone showed you the missing quarter.
You can tell a planner from a salesperson by what the first meeting is about, and by what happens after it.
What good planning looks like in the room
A planner spends that first conversation on you. Your life, your work, what you want the money for, what keeps you up at night. Not on products. 'We're not going to bamboozle you with talking about products and using jargon,' Ed says. You shouldn't leave a meeting more confused than you went in, and you shouldn't feel hurried through it.
The other tell is what happens next. A plan isn't a document you file and forget. Lives change, rules change, allowances change, and a plan that ignores all that quietly goes out of date. 'An initial financial plan is only as good as how often it's reviewed,' Ed says. Regular reviews aren't a box the regulator makes you tick. They're simply what keeping a plan alive looks like.
If you're not sure which kind of help you've got, there's a simple test. Speak to more than one adviser, and notice what each of them wants to talk about. Your life, or their products. The good ones give themselves away just as plainly as the rest.
The difference between a financial planner and a financial adviser was never really about job titles. It's the difference between being sold a set of products and being given a plan built around your life. And on the evidence, that gap is worth real money and a noticeably fuller retirement.
Three-quarters, or all of it
Why settle for 75 per cent instead of 100 per cent? Three-quarters of the way there is closer than most people ever manage, and it still isn't the goal. The goal is the whole of the life you could have had, not the slice of it you settled for because nobody showed you the rest.
If you'd like to find out whether you've got a plan or just a collection of products, Ed Blackett and the team at rockwealth Cheltenham can help.
