The client who needs us most is the client we’ve made hardest to reach.

Ask any financial adviser how their fees have changed in the last five years, and you already know the answer before they say it. Up. Substantially up.

The median adviser fee in Australia now sits at $3,960 a year. That is a rise of 58 per cent in five years. A comprehensive Statement of Advice, the document that used to be the entry point into our profession, now commonly costs between $3,500 and $6,500. The Financial Services Council itself has said the cost of advice has climbed past $5,000 in some cases.

We need to be honest about why

Part of it is simply the cost of doing business. Compliance, licensing, insurance, education standards. These things matter, and nobody serious in this profession wants to go back to a world without them.

But somewhere along the way, we built a system where the paperwork required to tell a 61 year old whether to restructure an asset before applying for the pension is not meaningfully different from the paperwork required to build a $2.5 million investment strategy from scratch. The safe harbour steps under the Best Interests Duty do not scale down for a small question. They ask for the same process regardless of what is actually being asked. And so advisers, quite reasonably, price every piece of advice as though it were the big one. Even the government has acknowledged this. Its own reform package, replacing the Statement of Advice with a shorter Client Advice Record and proposing to remove the safe harbour steps altogether, is built on the FSC's own estimate that doing so could cut the cost of advice by 40 per cent.

This is not an argument against regulation. It is an argument for regulation that does what it claims to do: protect the client, without making it commercially impossible to help the client who only needs one good answer.

 Here is what that failure actually costs. Australians say they are willing to pay $911 for advice. Those without an adviser say $553. Only six per cent of advisers offer a starting fee anywhere near that. Only seven per cent of Australians currently receive advice at all. The gap between what people can pay and what we charge is not a rounding error. It is most of the market, standing outside the door.

 And here is the part that should keep every one of us up at night. The system these people are trying to navigate alone has never been more complicated. Concessional caps. The transfer balance cap. The bring-forward rule. The Age Pension assets test and income test, and the way each one changes the value of every other decision. We ask ordinary Australians to make irreversible financial choices inside a system that most professionals need years of training to understand. And then we price the help out of reach for the people who need it most.

Because the value of advice does not scale the way we act like it does. Picture two clients. One is 58, sitting on $2.5 million, already diversified, already comfortable. Good advice sharpens their tax structure, tightens their allocation, adds real value over a decade. Meaningful. But marginal, against what they already have.

The other is 61, with $180,000 in super, planning to retire in four years. They have never heard of the assets test. One conversation, the right contribution timed correctly, an asset restructured before they apply, can be the difference between qualifying for a part pension and not. Between comfortable and anxious. That single hour of advice can be worth more to that person, in dollars and in dignity, than anything the wealthy client will ever experience.

 The client who needs us most is the client we have made it hardest to reach.

This is why we built Smart Happy Money the way we did. A low cost of entry. An SOA fee that will not price out the person who only needs one honest answer. Free education, because half the battle is simply understanding the questions worth asking. Not because we have solved this. Because someone has to start narrowing the gap instead of widening it.

 I do not think this fixes itself. I think it takes advisers willing to say the quiet part out loud, and a profession willing to build fee models around the clients who need us, not just the ones who are easiest to serve.

 So I will ask you directly. What is your practice actually doing about this? Is your fee structure built for the client with the least to spare, or only for the client who was always going to be fine?

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 Ben Graham-Nellor is a financial adviser and founder of Smart Happy Money, based in Melbourne. He writes about building a more human, more inclusive financial advice industry.