As a financial planner and – I flatter myself – human, I’ve always felt conflicted and frustrated by the limits of my usefulness to people out there in the real world. Particularly young people, who we still struggle to appeal to, and to fit into a regulated advice offering.
The problem is acute. Thirty eight per cent of 18 to 24-year-olds feel confident managing money, according to the Money and Pensions Service.
We all know about the challenges around scaling advice, though. Regulatory intervention has been good at making sure firms can demonstrate the value they provide to the (very small) number of clients who can, and want to, pay for advice.
But it’s also embedding the reality that providing financial advice is a niche and fundamentally high touch offering. It’s cranked up the time spent on client files and advice fees. You can see the issue here.
According to NextWealth’s 2025 Benchmarks Report, the average firm spends 4.8 staff hours preparing for a review, and that’s before the review meeting and follow-up work. Scale doesn’t help, apparently. The same research shows that number increases for firms with more advisers (it’s 7.2 hours for the very big – over 50 adviser – firms).
Young people might know more about money, but they still don’t feel any more confident when engaging with it
So, I think we might need to concede that we, advice firms, can’t help enough people out there in ways that are familiar to us. So what can we do? I think mentoring might be part of the answer, and I think our financial planning secret sauce can help.
We’ve always talked about financial literacy as an education issue. We’ve built better school resources, gamified financial apps and pushed for earlier interventions. But the fundamental problem remains: young people might know more about money, but they still don’t feel any more confident when engaging with it.
Many (many) moons ago I wrote my MA dissertation on young people’s engagement with finance. I expected to find gaps in knowledge, but the real issue looked more like an engagement gap. The students I spoke with were unengaged consumers of financial products that happened to have enormous life-changing impacts.
The way student debt is foisted on these vulnerable customers (if you will) is a scandal. But that’s another article. Most of them could describe how student loans worked, but not many had ever had a meaningful conversation with someone about money.
Clients need to be helped to engage with their money and the decisions they are making, so they can own those decisions
They were navigating complex choices in isolation, informed but unsupported. Fundamentally, it looked like a guidance issue.
Traditional financial education often carries a moral undertone: be sensible, save more, stop spending on Netflix/lottery tickets/the real Lurpak. But this type of framing (apart from being grotesquely smug and moralising) sees money as a test of discipline rather than a tool for autonomy.
But we know that a genuine sense of control over money is the fundamental principle of financial planning. Clients don’t need to be told off. They don’t need to be slammed over the head with technical explanations. They need to be helped to engage with their money and the decisions they are making, so they can own those decisions.
Most young people I meet are already making pragmatic financial decisions in a system that leaves them very little room for manoeuvre – balancing student debt, insecure housing and rising living costs.
They really, really don’t need the Netflix talk. They need help building self-belief, to see that financial wellbeing isn’t about confirming with someone else’s supposedly virtuous spending habits. It’s all about making informed choices that align with their values.
It’s time to stop financial advice being viewed as an ‘old boys club’
This is at the core of good financial planning. Good advisers know that the way to engage their clients is to shift the relationship with money from compliance to confidence from “don’t do this” towards “what matters to you?”
Other countries are already experimenting with a mentoring approach. In Canada, initiatives such as Prosper Canada and Momentum Calgary train financial coaches who work one-to-one with low-income and young adults, blending behavioural insights with empathy-led conversations.
Results are promising: participants show higher levels of financial confidence and long-term goal-following compared to those in purely educational schemes.
Similarly, in the USA, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s Youth Financial Capability Strategy has found that mentorship and experiential learning outperform classroom-only education.
These models recognise that financial capability isn’t a classroom outcome but a social one. Mentoring builds the relationships that make learning stick and leverages local networks.
What matters is empathy, relevant experience, and the willingness to have an honest conversation
The UK has made decent progress in embedding financial education into the curriculum, but it’s been restricted to the classroom. What if sixth forms, youth charities and employers had access to relatable, trusted mentors who could walk young people through real financial decisions in real time?
They wouldn’t need to be professional advisers. A 22-year-old who’s just paid off a student overdraft can sometimes reach another young person more effectively than a 50-year-old planner. What matters is empathy, relevant experience, and the willingness to have an honest conversation.
But I do think we can help. Our whole profession thrives on this type of trust and relationship-building. If we can find a way to get this know-how into mentoring networks, that could be one of the most powerful contributions we make to financial wellbeing.
Greg Moss is founder of Eleven.2 Financial Planning. He is a chartered financial planner and fellow of the Personal Finance Society
