"How do you get paid?"

If you remember only one question from anything I write, make it this one. Before you take financial advice from anyone — a relationship manager, an agent, a "wealth expert", a friend with a tip — ask them, plainly:

"How do you get paid?"

The answer tells you almost everything about whose interest the advice actually serves.

Why the question matters so much

Advice is never free, and it's rarely neutral. The person guiding you is paid somehow — and how they're paid quietly shapes what they'll suggest, often without any bad intent on their part.

Broadly, there are two models:

• They're paid by you — a fee you agree to, for advice. Their incentive is to keep you happy enough to keep paying. What they recommend and how they earn are pointed in the same direction as your interest.
• They're paid by the product — a commission from whoever's investment or policy you end up buying. Now there's a pull, however subtle, toward the products that pay them, and toward you buying more of them. The advice and the payment point in different directions.

Neither makes anyone a villain. Plenty of well-meaning people work in the second model. But you should know which one you're sitting across from, because it changes how to read everything they tell you.

How to read the answer

Listen for how clear and comfortable the answer is:

1. A clear, direct answer — "you pay me a fee, and I don't take commissions" — is a good sign. Alignment is easy to state when it exists.
2. A vague or deflecting answer — "don't worry, it's free to you", "the company takes care of me" — is itself the answer. Advice that's "free" to you is usually paid for by you, just invisibly, inside the product.
3. The tell: ask whether they'd still recommend the same thing if it paid them nothing. Watch what happens next.

Why "free" advice is the expensive kind

The most costly advice a family takes is often the advice that felt free — the plan sold at no visible charge, whose cost was buried in commissions and thick product structures for years. You never saw an invoice, so it felt like a gift. It wasn't.

Paying openly for advice can feel odd at first — we're used to it being "included." But a visible fee you agreed to is almost always cheaper, and far better aligned, than an invisible one you didn't.

The point

You don't need to become an expert on every product to protect yourself. You mostly need to ask one question early, and take the answer seriously. How do you get paid? — asked plainly, of anyone who wants to guide your money — is the single cheapest piece of due diligence you'll ever do.

A general note, not personal advice — always happy to talk through your own plan 1:1.