For most people with straightforward finances — a pension, an ISA, money in funds — the honest answer is yes, probably. I did exactly this: I fired my adviser at the end of 2023, moved everything to a low-cost platform, and put the money in plain index funds. It took two forms and a few weeks, and the only thing I regret is not doing it years earlier.
You won't find that answer in most of what Google serves up for this question, because most of it is written by advisers, adviser directories, or bodies that exist to point you at advisers.
Every guide telling you not to do it yourself is written by someone whose living depends on you not doing it yourself.
So here's the version from someone with no adviser to sell you.
What is my adviser actually costing me?
The typical all-in cost of an advised portfolio in the UK is 1.5% to 2% a year — the advice fee, the platform fee, and the fund fees stacked on top of each other. St James's Place, Britain's biggest wealth manager, puts its own example at 1.67% a year for a pension, and that's after their fees were simplified.
Percentages sound harmless, so make it money: on a £200,000 pension, 1.67% is about £3,340 a year, every year, whether your investments go up or down. Run the same £200,000 forward 20 years and the fee gap between an advised portfolio and a DIY one comes to about £243,000 — and the market risk was yours the whole time. The fee buys you an adviser. It does not buy you protection from losses.
What does an adviser actually do that I can't?
An honest question deserves an honest list, because there are real cases where advice earns its fee.
If you have a defined benefit (final salary) pension, keep it and take advice before touching it — the law requires it above £30,000, and rightly so. If your affairs are genuinely complex — business sales, inheritance tax planning, trusts, divorce — a good adviser or accountant can be worth every penny. And some people pay an adviser mainly to stop themselves panic-selling in a crash. That's a real service, though an expensive way to buy self-control.
Now the other side of the list. Picking funds? The boring answer — a low-cost global or S&P 500 tracker — is public knowledge, and no adviser has reliably beaten it. Rebalancing, ISA allowances, pension top-ups? These are afternoon jobs, not professions. The day-to-day management most people think they're paying for mostly doesn't exist: your money sits in the same funds year round while the fee comes out monthly.
Here's the question that settles it for most people: your workplace pension is already invested, right now, without an adviser attached to it. Does that keep you up at night?
What would I do instead?
What I actually did. One mainstream platform with a flat fee. One low-cost index fund as the foundation. A monthly direct debit, and then — this is the hard part — nothing. No watching, no tinkering, no quarterly reviews with coffee and a slide deck. The entire setup takes an afternoon, and the running of it takes minutes a year.
That's the strategy the fees were paying for. It was never complicated. It was just quietly expensive.
How do I actually leave?
It's pure admin, and the new platform does nearly all of it: you open the matching empty accounts, request the transfer, and your adviser is informed rather than consulted. I've written the exact steps in how to leave your financial adviser — and if you're with St James's Place specifically, here's what leaving costs and how the exit charge maths works.
Ditching your adviser doesn't mean going it alone with no idea. It means keeping the boring, sensible plan — and keeping the 1.67% too.
This is what I write about every week — managing your own money in plain English, without paying someone 1–2% a year to do it worse. The letter is free.
I am not a financial adviser. Nothing here is personal financial advice. This is my own experience and opinion, shared for information and education. Whether leaving an adviser makes sense depends on your circumstances — especially if you hold products with guarantees or a defined benefit pension. Investing involves risk and you can lose money. Please do your own research before acting.