Fixed-Fee Financial Planning

The expat advice market has a long-standing problem, and it is not competence. It is remuneration.

A substantial part of the industry serving expatriates in the Gulf has historically been paid by commission, and the largest commissions attach to long-term regulated savings plans: contractual products, often twenty or twenty-five years, where the adviser is paid up front against the total you have promised to contribute. The effect is that the adviser's earnings are settled in the first couple of years, while your commitment runs for decades.

Those products are not universally unsuitable. But they are frequently sold where a simple, liquid, low-cost portfolio would have served better, and their costs are genuinely difficult to see — spread across establishment charges, allocation rates, policy fees, fund charges and early-encashment penalties that can consume a large share of what you have paid in if your circumstances change. Expatriate circumstances change often.

Fee-based advice does not guarantee better decisions. What it does is remove the conflict: when the adviser is paid the same regardless of which product you end up with, the recommendation is free to be no product at all.

Worth establishing before you engage anyone: exactly how they are paid, by whom, what happens to their remuneration if you stop contributing, and what it costs you to walk away in year three.