The financial help industry is confusing by accident and by design, and the confusion is expensive in both directions. Coaches, advisers, planners, brokers, guidance services — the words overlap, get used loosely, and it's genuinely hard to know who you need. Get it wrong one way and you pay four figures for advice a free service could have given you; get it wrong the other way and you muddle through a defined-benefit pension decision alone. Both happen every day.
So here's the honest map: who does what, what each actually costs, when each is the right call — and how to check anyone out before money changes hands.
Guidance vs advice — the line that matters most
The core difference. Guidance and coaching help you understand your situation and your options, and act on them yourself. Advice is a regulated recommendation of what you specifically should do — a product, a fund, a transfer — and only firms authorised by the Financial Conduct Authority can give it. The regulation exists to protect you: an authorised adviser carries liability for their recommendation, and you get access to the Financial Ombudsman and compensation schemes if it goes wrong.
Neither is better; they're different tools. The expensive mistake is paying advice prices for a guidance-shaped problem — or trusting a guidance-shaped answer with an advice-shaped decision.
The money coach
A financial coach — which is what Buzz Money Coach is — helps you see where you actually stand, build a plan, form habits that stick, and follow through. A coach does not recommend products, pick investments, or give regulated advice — and a good one says so in plain sight rather than the small print. Coaching is the right starting point when:
- You're not sure where the money goes each month, or there's more month than money.
- You have goals but no plan with numbers and dates attached.
- You know what you should be doing — you're just not doing it.
- You want to walk into a big decision (house, pension, investing) actually understanding it.
- You saw an adviser once, nodded along, and left with a folder you never opened.
Coaching costs a fraction of regulated advice because there's no product, no regulated recommendation and no liability trail. Ours are on the site in plain sight: the Financial Freedom Score is free; a Health Check is £39 (free for Buzz Accounting clients); the Money Road Map, twelve months mapped into ninety-day goals, is £399; the Financial Plan, which models your numbers out to age 100, is £1,500; and ongoing coaching is £69 a month, or £39 per half-hour session. No percentages, no ongoing tie-in.
The financial adviser
A regulated financial adviser recommends specific products and strategies — pensions, investments, protection — and is legally bound to ensure the recommendation suits your circumstances. For some decisions advice isn't just wise, it's the law: transferring a defined-benefit (final salary) pension worth more than £30,000 legally requires regulated advice before it can go ahead. It's also clearly the right tool for investing serious lump sums, restructuring pensions, arranging protection properly, and inheritance tax planning with any complexity.
What it costs, per MoneyHelper: a first meeting is usually free; after that expect hourly rates of £100–£350 (around £150 is typical), fixed project fees, or percentages — commonly 1–4% of the amount invested up front, and 0.5–1% a year ongoing if they keep managing it. An independent adviser can recommend from the whole market; a restricted one from a limited range. Always ask which you're facing — and how they'd like to be paid — before anything else. How to find a good adviser covers the qualifications, questions and red flags in detail.
Say you have a £120,000 pension pot and an adviser charges 2% initially and 0.75% a year ongoing. Up front: £2,400. Each year (on a static balance): £900. Over five years that's £2,400 + (5 × £900) = £6,900 — real balances move, but the shape holds.
That is not an argument against advice. On the right problem — tax structure, a complex transfer, stopping a panicked sale in a bad market — a good adviser can repay that several times over. The waste is paying it for questions that coaching, or free guidance, answers. Know which kind of question you're holding before you pay advice prices for it.
The mortgage broker
A mortgage broker is a specialist adviser for one job: getting you the right mortgage. They search deals across the market, know which lenders will actually accept your circumstances, handle the paperwork — and usually cost you nothing directly, because the lender pays them a procuration fee (typically 0.35%–0.5% of the loan) on completion. Some charge a client fee too, commonly £300–£500, mostly for complex cases. For most people a whole-of-market broker is a straightforward win over walking into your own bank — here's how it works and what to ask.
The free help worth knowing
Before you pay anyone, know what's free — impartial, government-backed, no sales pitch:
- MoneyHelper — free guidance on budgeting, pensions, debt, insurance, home-buying; backed by government and genuinely good.
- Pension Wise (part of MoneyHelper) — a free, impartial appointment for over-50s on your options for taking defined-contribution pension money. If you're 50+, book it before any pension decision.
- StepChange and National Debtline — free, expert, confidential debt help.
A blunt warning. If a ‘debt management company’ wants a monthly fee, walk away — the charities above do the same work free, and better. Paying for debt help out of money that should be clearing debt makes a bad situation worse.
How to check anyone before you pay them
One habit protects you from almost every horror story: check the Financial Services Register before engaging any adviser or broker. It's the FCA's public record of who's authorised to do what. And because scammers clone real firms' names and paperwork, contact the firm using the phone number or website shown on the register, not the details on the email or card in front of you. One more rule that filters out most scams by itself: cold calls about pensions have been illegal in the UK since 2019 — if someone rings you out of the blue about your pension, hang up.
Before you hand over a penny.
- Find the firm on the Financial Services Register — authorised, and for the service you're buying.
- Get how they're paid in writing: fees, percentages, and anything they receive from third parties.
- Ask: independent or restricted? Whole-of-market or panel?
- Ask for the total first-year cost, and each year after, in pounds — not percentages.
- Ask what happens if you want to stop the ongoing service.
How Buzz fits together
The Buzz group is deliberately built to cover the spectrum without the hard sell. Buzz Money Coach is the coaching layer — the score, the plan, the habits, the accountability. When you reach a genuinely regulated decision — a pension move, an investment, protection — we say so. Buzz Money Ltd is not authorised to give regulated advice, and does not — where you need it, we say so and can introduce you to Equity & General, authorised and regulated by the FCA (No. 474163), entirely optional and with no obligation. The groundwork carries across; you don't start again, and you arrive at the expensive conversation already knowing your numbers and what you want from it.
If you're not sure which kind of help you actually need, that's precisely what the free Financial Freedom Score is for: eight minutes, eight areas, and a clear picture of whether your next step is a habit, a plan — or a regulated adviser.