There's a question almost nobody asks when they're given advice about money.
Not "is this good advice?".
But "who does it pay?".
The two sound alike. They're nothing of the sort.
A piece of advice can be technically correct and, at the same time, built to earn the person giving it more than it will ever earn you. That's not a contradiction. It is, in fact, the most common way the market for financial advice works.
I want to give you a compass. Not so you'll distrust everyone — that would be wrong, and exhausting to live with — but so that every time, you can tell which side the person talking to you is standing on.
Because there's one phrase that explains almost all of it, and I'll say it now so we don't lose sight of it: conflict of interest.
A conflict of interest is when the person advising you has something of their own riding on the choice you make. That isn't a scam in itself. It's a position. The point is knowing when it's there, because it changes everything that follows.
Three figures people often mix up
When it comes to money, plenty of people are talking to you these days. It's worth sorting out three figures that are easy to mistake for one another.
I keep them apart because the way they earn is different. And the way someone earns is the thing that, more than anything else, decides what they'll tell you.
The finfluencer.
This is whoever talks about finance on social media. Videos, reels, posts. Often a good explainer, likeable, able to make a complicated thing feel simple. So far, so excellent: spreading knowledge is valuable.
The point is how they earn. Almost never from the advice itself. They earn from views, from sponsorships, from links to platforms that pay them a commission for every person who signs up thanks to them.
That changes what it pays them to tell you. It pays them to keep you glued to the screen and to get you signing up where they get paid. Not necessarily to leave you better off with your money ten years from now — which is a slow, quiet thing, and gets almost no views.
The salesperson dressed as an adviser.
This is the trickiest of the three, because they present themselves as being on your side while being nothing of the kind.
You walk into a bank, into a distribution network, into a smart-looking office. A polite, competent person explains that they'll help you make your savings grow. The job title says "adviser". You feel looked after.
Except that their pay, in whole or in part, depends on how much they sell you and what. More precisely: they often earn trail commissions.
Let me unpack that, because it's a term few people know and it carries a lot of weight. A trail commission is a slice of the fees on the product you're sold that flows back to whoever placed it with you. You buy a fund that holds back a percentage of your money every year: a share of that percentage ends up, year after year, with the person who recommended it.
You see what happens. That person doesn't earn if you do well. They earn if you buy that product, and keep holding it. Their interest and yours don't point the same way — sometimes they line up by chance, often they don't.
The independent adviser.
This is someone who gives you advice and is paid by you, a fee, for the advice. Full stop.
They take no trail commissions. They don't earn based on what you buy. Whether you pick product A or product B, or neither, their pay doesn't change.
The trade calls it fee-only advice: you pay the fee and nothing else, no hidden commissions. It's the figure whose interest sits closest to yours, because the only thing that pays them is giving you good advice, so you come back next year.
They're not perfect either — a fee is a cost too, and it deserves scrutiny. But at least here the conflict of interest is down to a minimum: you're paying them to think, not to sell you something.
The question that unmasks all three
Have you spotted the thread running through them?
To work out who you can trust, you don't have to judge how sharp or how likeable the person talking to you is.
You have to work out how they earn.
It's the question that cuts through everything: if I follow your advice, how do you get paid?
- Paid by views and sponsors? That's entertainment. Take it for what it is.
- Paid by what they sell you? That's a salesperson. A good one, maybe, but a salesperson.
- Paid by a fee you hand over, and nothing else? That's much closer to actually being on your side.
This isn't cynicism. It's mental hygiene.
Asking "who does it pay?" doesn't mean assuming everyone is acting in bad faith. Most people working in finance are honest and competent. But even the most honest person alive, if they're paid a certain way, will end up — perhaps without noticing — pushing in the direction they're paid to push.
It isn't a question of character. It's a question of incentives. And incentives win almost every time.
An example, with made-up numbers
Let's take an example. The names and figures are invented; they're only here to give the thing a shape.
Luca has put aside €30,000 and doesn't know what to do with it.
He goes to the bank. A perfectly charming adviser offers him a fund, "well diversified, professionally managed". Cost: 2% a year. Put that way, it sounds like very little.
Let's see what that 2% actually means.
On €30,000, it's €600 a year. Every year. Regardless of how the fund does: up, down, flat, that €600 comes out just the same.
Over ten years, growth aside, that's roughly €6,000. A sizeable slice of the starting capital, gone in fees.
And part of that 2% — say half — flows back as a trail commission to the person who sold it. Luca's adviser, in practice, collects a small annuity every year simply because Luca is holding that fund.
Now: the fund might even be a decent one. I'm not saying it's a scam.
I'm saying something else. That Luca walked out of that room believing he'd been given advice, and had in fact been given a sale. And that the person sitting across from him had an excellent reason to put forward precisely that product, and no reason at all to say the most useful sentence of the lot: "Luca, of this €30,000 you might want to keep a part liquid, and we can look at the rest calmly, with no rush to put it anywhere today".
That sentence earns nobody anything. Which is why it's so rarely heard.
This isn't a new problem, and I didn't discover it. People have written important pages on how the asset management industry works, far too often, against the saver rather than for them. I've written about it elsewhere, among the books that Cashfulness is built on: the lesson I take home is a single one, and it works as a survival rule — be wary of anyone selling you a product dressed up as advice.
Where Cashfulness stands in all this
And here I come to us, because it's only right that I put to myself the same question I've asked you to put to everyone else.
Who does Cashfulness pay?
I'll answer as plainly as I can: Cashfulness doesn't sell financial products.
It doesn't offer you a fund. It doesn't steer you towards a platform. It takes no commission on what you do with your money. It takes no trail commissions, because there's no product for them to come from.
That means something simple, but it changes the nature of the tool: we have no hidden stake in the number you see.
Think of it against Luca's bank. Luca's adviser earned more if Luca bought a certain thing. We don't care what you decide. Genuinely, it doesn't touch us. Whether you leave the money in your account, buy a house, invest it, or do nothing at all for a year: our work is the same, and so is our income.
Cashfulness gives you the position fix — your true financial position, today: everything you own minus everything you owe, what we call net worth. It puts it in front of you, clear and complete.
Then it stops.
It doesn't tell you whether that fund is any good. It doesn't tell you whether to buy a house. It never decides in your place. It gives you the coordinate to start from, and the decision stays entirely yours.
I say this because it's a position, not a feature I've invented for the occasion: I've set it down in black and white among the things we'll never do. A tool with no interests of its own in your money is a tool you can trust precisely because it has nothing to sell you.
The tool for judging on your own
There's one last thing, and it may be the most important.
Having a compass for spotting conflicts of interest doesn't get you far if, sitting in front of the adviser, you can't read your own numbers.
Because that's where it's won or lost. The most skilful salesperson plays on your fog: if you don't know precisely how much you have, how much liquidity you need, where your money is, you're forced to trust the story you're being told.
But if you show up with your coordinate already in hand, the conversation changes completely.
Back to Luca. Imagine that, before walking into the bank, Luca knows exactly what his net worth is, how many months he could live on the liquid money he holds, how much of his wealth is already invested and how much isn't.
That Luca isn't at the adviser's mercy. He asks different questions. "This 2%, compared to what? How much stays liquid afterwards? What happens if I need this money in two years?". He's no longer someone you sell to. He's someone who evaluates.
The difference between the two Lucas isn't intelligence. It's that the second one has real data under his feet, and from the real you can reason.
That, in the end, is what Cashfulness does for a living: not give you the right advice in everyone else's place — I'd just be one more person telling you what to do — but put you in a position to judge for yourself the advice you're given.
The question "who does it pay?" is the first half of the job.
The second half is being able to answer it with your own numbers in plain sight, instead of with the fear of not understanding.
A small, concrete freedom
I'm not telling you never to talk to an adviser. A good adviser, paid the right way, is worth every euro of their fee.
And I'm not telling you to stop watching finfluencers. Some of them explain useful things; you just need to know it's general education, not advice tailored to you.
I'm telling you something simpler and more your own: that awareness is a form of freedom.
The freedom to listen to anyone without being in awe of them. To take the good that's there and leave the rest. To sit at a table across from someone who makes a living out of money, and not feel like the weakest person in the room — because you know your own numbers, and nobody can tell you a different story about those.
Money is a tool for buying time and freedom. This too is a small freedom: never having to wonder again whether the person advising you is thinking of you or of themselves.
You ask the question once — who does it pay? — and from then on you listen more calmly.
The calm side of money. Even when the person on the other side of the table would quite like to sell you something.
— Vittorio