I agree with him on this perception. When I started this career, I offered my service free of charge. I do not charge clients any money for advice. I also made house call and went to houses. All new advisers do that anyway. But I found that many people do not value the service. Sometime they delayed their decision without reasons. Other times, they buy the products I recommended from another adviser. Why? I have no idea except to suspect that they perceived my advice to be cheap or lousy.

Then I decided that instead of wasting time doing house calls, I decided that I should only meet clients in my own office at Beach Road. In this way, I filtered out many insincere clients. I continue to give free advice because I told them that the first few hours is free of charge. It worked quite well for sometime and it is still working.

However, in recent time I felt that if I really want to do high quality financial advice, I must charge a fee. Actually, regardless of whether the advice is free or not the advice I give is always the same.  But the problem is that without charging fee, it seems that clients psychologically always think that I am a salesman. I discovered that by charging a fee, clients take me very seriously. I will therefore be highly motivated to do a good job for them knowing that they would appreciate the work I do for them.

Still, my advice to clients - whether was it free (like in the past) or chargable (like now) is always the same.

But if this model of fee-based is necessary for client to take my work seriously, it will have to be a fee-based model.

Thus, I have been rejecting many new potential clients who wanted me to help them but did not subscribe to the idea of fee-based planning.

Ironically, when clients pay me a fee to do their financial planning, they often revealed to me the deepest and most confidential matters which they would never have disclosed to others. Sometime (I suspect) not even to their own spouse. With such disclosure, I can at last apply my full skill into helping them. It is very satisfying to be a financial adviser in the purest sense.

However, in the first few years of my career, there are also many many clients who trusted me although I gave them free advice. They did not viewed me as a salesperson and believed I gave them good advice. I will always remember them because they are the industry's rare breed.  Of course, I will not charge them any fee for future advice. It is not necessary because they understood that advice is priceless and has no price tag.