I paid for advice for years. It cost me about a fifth of my pension.

What it cost me

Over the years I paid commissions and charges to advisers and pension companies that I would put at roughly a fifth of my entire pension pot.

Not a fifth of one year's growth. A fifth of the whole thing, taken in payments so small and so regular that not one of them ever felt worth questioning.

In fairness to my younger self, the alternatives did not exist. No cheap global index funds on a phone, no flat-fee platforms, no comparison tables. You went to a man in an office and the charges were simply what things cost.

That is no longer true, and it is the whole reason this site exists.

Why I am the wrong age to be writing this, and why that is the point

Most people writing about investing for your twenties and thirties are in their twenties and thirties. Their plan is a hypothesis. Nobody knows yet whether it worked.

I am in my early sixties. I have retired early, and I have not started drawing my pension yet.

That second part matters more than the first. The state pension age is currently 66 and rising to 67, so I have stopped working several years before that and the pot is still sitting there untouched, still invested, still growing. That was not luck. That was the plan, and I now know whether it worked.

So I know which decisions mattered, and I know exactly which of my mistakes were expensive, because I have already paid for them.

Think of it as a postcard from the destination rather than a map drawn by someone who has not left yet.

The six stages, and what they really are

Here is the process a financial adviser will take you through. I have not made this up, it is the standard shape of the job.

Look at what is actually happening there.

Stages 1 and 2 are entirely about you. Your goals, your income, your timeline, how you would feel watching a third of your money vanish. You are the world expert on all of it. The adviser is writing it down on a form.

Stage 3 is a spreadsheet and a questionnaire. The gap between where you are and where you want to be is arithmetic. The risk score is a set of multiple choice questions that produce a number, usually between 1 and 7, and you are the one answering them.

Stage 4 is where it gets interesting. Choosing the wrapper is a rules question with a fairly obvious answer. Then, at many firms, your risk number goes off to an in-house or partner investment team who send back the fund that matches it. Worth knowing, because that is a step people imagine is a bespoke piece of craftsmanship and it is often a lookup table.

Stages 5 and 6 are the only parts left with real work in them, and cheap index funds and cheap platforms have made stage 5 a fifteen minute job.

It is a bit like a house survey. Three hours of measuring and photographing produces an impressive forty-page report, and it is real work. But the number at the end came from comparing your house to three similar ones down the road. Not magic, and not worth a percentage of the house every year forever.

The six pages

I am writing these in the order that makes sense to read them, but stage six is the one I would want you to read first anyway, so it is up already.

What the six stages cost, if you buy them

Advisers charge in two places, and it is the second one that does the damage.

Ranges are typical UK figures and vary widely between firms. Always ask for the total all-in cost in pounds, not just the percentage.

The percentage is the trick. Half a per cent sounds like a rounding error. On a pot that grows for thirty years it is not, because you are paying it on a bigger and bigger number every year, and the money it takes out never gets to compound either.

Always convert it into pounds before you decide how you feel about it.

See what fees cost over 30 years

The part nobody sells you: the annual meeting

Here is the honest case for an adviser, and it is a better one than most DIY sites admit.

Their real product is not fund selection. It is the phone call in March 2020, or February 2009, that stops you selling everything at the bottom. That call is worth a great deal, because selling in a crash is the one mistake that turns a temporary fall into a permanent loss.

If you are going to do this yourself, you have to replace that phone call with something. For me it is a written set of rules, made when markets were calm, that I follow without renegotiating.

That is page six, and I think it is the most important page in this section.

Every month, I show you what changed

An adviser charges around one per cent a year and gives you one review meeting.

I publish a review every month, free, showing exactly what changed in my ISA and pension and why. Most months the honest answer is nothing changed, and that is the point rather than a failure. My rule is simple: I only change something if I can write down the reason. Not having a reason is a reason not to change.

Get the monthly update

Who should actually pay an adviser

I would be selling you something if I said nobody needs one. Some situations are genuinely complicated, and getting them wrong costs far more than the fee.

In those cases the fee buys something real. For a straightforward ISA and pension, built from a couple of cheap funds and left alone for thirty years, it mostly does not.

That was my situation. This section is what I did about it.

Read stage six, my rules