Every new client who comes to IWP completes a Life Survey. It is not a risk profile and it is not an investment questionnaire. Financial wellbeing is only one part of it.
Clients score themselves across eight areas of life: career, emotional wellbeing, environmental wellbeing, financial wellbeing, intellectual wellbeing, physical wellbeing, social wellbeing and spiritual wellbeing. The purpose is to understand where someone is today, not simply what they own.
Recently, we compared the responses of newer clients with people who had been working with us for a number of years. Some of the results were predictable. Existing clients scored higher financially. What surprised us was that they scored higher across every category.
The largest relative difference was not financial wellbeing. It was spiritual wellbeing.
That was not where I expected the results to lead. It also raised a question. When people talk about the value of financial advice, they usually talk about investment returns, tax outcomes or portfolio construction. Those things matter. But they do not explain why somebody might report higher wellbeing in areas of life that appear only loosely connected to money.
So we looked at what other researchers had found. Not only about investment performance, but about how people experience their financial lives.
What our Life Survey found
The table compares newer clients with existing clients. The improvement figures are based on the averages shown and rounded to the nearest whole percentage point.
| Wellbeing area | New clients | Existing clients | Relative improvement |
| Career | 3.3 | 3.9 | +18% |
| Emotional | 3.4 | 4.0 | +18% |
| Environmental | 3.0 | 3.7 | +23% |
| Financial | 3.1 | 3.8 | +23% |
| Intellectual | 2.7 | 3.2 | +19% |
| Physical | 3.2 | 3.9 | +22% |
| Social | 3.3 | 3.7 | +12% |
| Spiritual | 2.5 | 3.2 | +28% |
The figures do not prove cause and effect. The survey is observational, and the two groups may differ in ways that have nothing to do with how long they have worked with IWP. Still, the pattern is hard to ignore. Existing clients scored higher across all eight areas, with the largest relative difference in spiritual wellbeing at 28 per cent.
What happens when people feel financially organised?
The closest external comparison we found was Vanguard’s 2025 study, The Emotional and Time Value of Advice. Vanguard surveyed 12,443 investors, including 7,746 advised clients. The study looked beyond portfolio returns to financial stress, peace of mind, emotions and the time people spend thinking about or dealing with their money.
The differences were substantial. Fourteen per cent of advised investors reported high levels of financial stress, compared with 27 per cent of self-directed investors. In other words, advised investors were roughly half as likely to report high financial stress.
Eighty-six per cent of advised clients said advice gave them greater peace of mind. The figure increased to 88 per cent among clients working with a human adviser.
Among human-advised clients, 71 per cent reported an increase in positive emotions such as confidence and security. Seventy-nine per cent reported a decrease in negative emotions such as anxiety, worry, sadness, disappointment and feeling overwhelmed.
Time was another part of the finding. Seventy-six per cent of advised clients said advice saved them time, with a median saving of two hours a week. That is more than 100 hours a year no longer spent thinking about or dealing with personal finances.
Again, these are self-reported results rather than a controlled experiment. But they capture something clients often describe in meetings: the relief that comes from feeling organised and knowing somebody is paying attention.
An Australian comparison
Russell Investments’ Value of an Adviser 2026 research, based on 501 advised investors, 200 non-advised investors and 237 financial advisers in Australia, found a similar theme. Before receiving advice, 41 per cent of advised clients strongly agreed that they were confident in achieving their financial goals. After receiving advice, the figure rose to 83 per cent.
Russell also found that reassurance about financial security had overtaken retirement planning as the leading reason advised clients sought advice: 43 per cent cited reassurance, compared with 38 per cent who cited retirement planning.
The studies use different questions and methodologies, so the figures should not be treated as directly comparable. Even so, the overlap is notable. Vanguard measured lower stress, greater peace of mind and time returned. Russell measured a marked increase in confidence and a strong demand for reassurance.
Preparedness matters too
The CFP Board’s Financial Planning Longitudinal Study 2025 approached the issue from another angle. It found that households working with CFP professionals were generally better prepared than unadvised households. They were more likely to have emergency savings, more likely to have estate planning arrangements in place and more likely to report stronger financial wellbeing.
Preparedness rarely attracts the same attention as investment performance or tax savings. Yet it is close to what many clients are seeking. Will we be okay if I retire? Can we afford to help our children? What happens if one of us dies? Can I step back from work? How much is enough?
Those are life questions. Money is one of the inputs.
What advisers actually do
There is a persistent belief that financial advisers spend most of their time selecting investments. In practice, investments are often the easier part. The harder work is helping people make decisions when there is no obvious answer.
During the COVID sell-off in 2020, one of our advisers received around 50 calls in a single day. Nobody rang wanting to discuss a valuation model. They were worried. The conversations were about whether to sell, whether the world had changed, and whether they should do something immediately.
The role of the adviser was not to predict the market. It was to help clients avoid making a long-term decision based on short-term fear.
Most advice looks less dramatic. A family works through a Disability Support Pension claim and discovers how many moving parts are involved. A retiree wants to know whether they can spend more without running out of money. A business owner sells and suddenly faces tax, superannuation, investment and succession decisions at the same time. A client changes how income is structured and saves tax each year.
Individually, those situations do not make headlines. Together, they are much of what advisers actually do: helping people make better decisions.
The financial value still matters
Morningstar’s Mind the Gap 2026 study compared the dollar-weighted return earned by the average dollar invested in US mutual funds and exchange-traded funds with the funds’ aggregate time-weighted return. Over the 10 years ended 31 December 2025, the average dollar earned 8.7 per cent a year, while the funds earned 9.9 per cent. The 1.2 percentage point gap reflected the timing and magnitude of purchases and withdrawals.
Morningstar is careful about the interpretation. The gap can reflect poorly timed decisions, but it can also arise from sensible activity such as regular contributions, withdrawals or rebalancing. Its practical conclusion is not that investors are irrational. It is that investors generally do better when transactions are deliberate, systematic and less reactive to recent events.
Other research asks different questions. Vanguard’s Putting a Value on Your Value: Quantifying Vanguard Advisor’s Alpha examines the potential value of best-practice advice. Morningstar’s Alpha, Beta, and Now… Gamma looks at the effect of planning decisions on retirement income. Russell’s Value of an Adviser 2026 estimates value across asset allocation, behavioural coaching, choices and trade-offs, expertise and tax-savvy planning.
These estimates are not directly comparable and should not be sold as a guaranteed return. What they share is a focus on decisions: choosing an appropriate allocation, staying invested, structuring tax effectively, planning withdrawals and coordinating the trade-offs that come with real life.
Back to the survey
The finding that stays with me is that the largest relative difference in our Life Survey was spiritual wellbeing, not financial wellbeing.
I am not suggesting that financial advisers improve spiritual wellbeing. That would be a stretch. But reducing financial uncertainty may create room for people to focus on other things. People retire when they are ready. They help children and grandchildren. They travel. They volunteer. They spend more time thinking about what they want to do and less time wondering whether they can afford it.
Vanguard found that advised clients reported less stress, greater peace of mind and more time. Russell found a marked increase in confidence after advice. The CFP Board found greater preparedness. Our own survey found that existing clients scored higher across every wellbeing category.
None of this proves cause and effect. But it is an interesting pattern.
The value of advice may not simply be that it helps people build wealth. It may be that, once people feel organised and confident about their financial position, they spend less time worrying about money and more time deciding what they want that money to make possible.
Research referenced
- Vanguard, The Emotional and Time Value of Advice, June 2025.
- Russell Investments, Value of an Adviser 2026.
- Morningstar, Mind the Gap 2026, 6 August 2026.
- Vanguard, Putting a Value on Your Value: Quantifying Vanguard Advisor’s Alpha.
- Blanchett and Kaplan, Alpha, Beta, and Now… Gamma.
- CFP Board, Financial Planning Longitudinal Study 2025.
- Independent Wealth Partners, Life Survey 2026.