Finding a Wealth Advisor that works for you.
She has her questions ready. Fees, returns, the retirement projections. The things you’re supposed to ask so that nobody mistakes you for someone who doesn’t know what she’s doing. Each one comes back answered, competently, by a person who had the answer prepared before she sat down. That is the strange thing about a well-run financial meeting: the questions that make you feel informed are often the ones the meeting was designed to absorb.
What gets settled in that room is bigger than it first appears. It can feel like a formality: due diligence, a competent stranger, a portfolio that needs managing. But the terms of your relationship with your own money are being set, and those terms have a way of holding for decades. If you are established early on as the person things get explained to, rather than the person they get decided with, that is often what you remain.
Meanwhile, the questions that never come up, what the wealth is for, what it is doing in the world while it sits in your name, whether you even want more of it, are often the questions that determine whether your capital ever does anything beyond the thing it was originally built to do: grow.
For women, this matters more, and for longer. We tend to inherit later, live longer with the money once we do, and are still treated as junior partners in our own financial lives. The figures show it: around 53% of women’s assets sit unmanaged, compared with 45% for men. That gap is often described as caution. It looks more like a judgement: women declining to pay for something the industry has never convincingly shown them the value of. Over thirty or forty years, the wrong advisor can cost a great deal that no fee schedule will ever itemise.
"We are still treated as junior partners in our own financial lives."
The first meeting with your wealth advisor deserves more than the usual script, and so does every one after it. What follows is a way to use the time differently: three layers of questions. The ones any advisor expects, the ones most have never been trained to hold, and the ones that tell you, quickly, whether the person across the table is someone you can actually think and learn alongside.
These came from the women we know: what they’ve learned to ask and what they wish they had. They are not a checklist, and no one needs to walk into a single meeting armed with every question here. They are starting points, prompts to help you ask more, understand more, and feel more agency in conversations that too often position you as the recipient of advice rather than a participant in the decisions being made.
The questions they expect
Any decent advisor will be ready for these, and you should still ask. Fees matter. Fiduciary status matters. Knowing who you’re hiring matters.
- How are you compensated, and what are the total costs I’ll bear, including underlying fund and product fees?
- Are you a fiduciary? (In writing.)
- What does your typical client look like, and may I speak with a few of them?
- How do you help clients plan for longevity, divorce, widowhood and career breaks?
- How do tax, estate and insurance planning fit in, or who do you bring in?
- If I have a partner, how do you make sure both of us are equally informed and heard?
- What happens to my account if you leave the firm?
The questions they don’t expect
These sit underneath the script: what the wealth is for, and what it is doing in the world while it grows. Most advisors haven’t been trained for them, which doesn’t mean none can hold them. You will find out quickly.
- Should I have this much money? What would “enough” look like, and how would we know when I’d reached it?
- Whose labour, land, or extraction made this wealth possible, and what does that mean for what I do with it now?
- How is my money participating in the climate crisis while it sits in my account?
- What would it look like to invest in things that don’t provide returns: repair, restoration, regeneration?
- What if I don’t want to leave my children wealthy? How might I prepare them not to inherit?
- How would you advise someone who believes the next fifty years won’t look like the last fifty?
- How might we explore what having this money might be doing to me, to my relationships, my agency, my sense of self?
The questions that tell you who you’re sitting with
The third layer is diagnostic. It is how you find out whether the person across from you can actually hold an unscripted conversation, or whether they perform openness while their answers reveal familiar templates.
- Tell me about a time you changed your mind about an investment approach you used to recommend.
- If I told you I didn’t want to buy anything you sell, what would our conversation look like?
- Which of your firm’s products do you personally not use, and why?
- Tell me about a client you turned down or referred elsewhere, and why.
- How will you know if your advice turns out to be wrong for me?
- What’s the most unusual thing a client has ever asked you to help with?
What to listen for
How an advisor answers matters more than what they say. Specificity is the giveaway: real clients, real situations, real changes of mind.
The deeper test is whether the questions land. Many wealth advisors are trained to absorb client emotion and return it as managed risk, and much of the standard script is built for exactly that purpose. Some advisors can do more. They can sit with a question that does not have a product attached, follow it where it leads and tell you honestly when it has taken you beyond the edge of what they know.
That is the person worth hiring, and it is the conversation worth having, particularly now, when the assumptions underneath the standard script are being argued over in public: whether wealth at this scale can keep compounding without consequence, and what an advisor’s job is if it cannot.