The One-Day Challenge: Could You Actually Sort Your Own Financial Plan?

There's a genuine shift happening in how people approach their finances. More South Africans are doing their own research, reading up on investment products, comparing insurance quotes online, and generally taking a far more hands-on, self-directed approach to their money than previous generations did. That's a good thing, in most respects — informed clients ask better questions and understand their own finances more deeply.

But it raises a real question: has that shift made a financial advisor less necessary? Here's a challenge worth sitting with before answering that.

Try this, honestly, on your own: today, using only your own research, secure all of the following —

• Life insurance
• Disability cover
• Medical aid
• Short-term insurance (your car, your home, your possessions)
• A retirement annuity
• A properly structured investment
• A valid, properly drafted will

Not eventually. Not spread across three months of evenings and weekends, chasing different call centres and comparing different application portals. In one day.

It's not possible — and the reason isn't that you're not capable of understanding any single one of these products. It's that each one is its own specialised world, with its own providers, application processes, underwriting requirements, and fine print, and properly comparing even one of them thoroughly takes real time. Stacking all seven into a single day isn't a knowledge problem. It's a logistics and access problem.

Self-directed research works well for understanding concepts — you genuinely can learn how a living annuity works, or what a retirement annuity's tax deduction looks like, by reading good content (including the articles on this site). Where it runs into a wall is execution across multiple products at once, because:

• Every insurer and product provider has its own application process, underwriting criteria, and documentation requirements
• Comparing products properly means understanding not just price, but exclusions, waiting periods, and how each product interacts with the others you're taking out
• Nobody sends you a single consolidated view of your full financial picture — you'd have to build that yourself, across seven or more entirely separate relationships, and keep it updated as your life changes

Doing deep research on your own is genuinely valuable. Doing execution across seven specialised product categories, alone, in a fragmented way, on your own timeline, is a different thing entirely — and it's where most people's financial plans stall halfway, sometimes for years, without anyone quite noticing.

This is the real value an advisor provides, and it's easy to undersell it as just "convenience." A single, properly conducted meeting with an advisor who's licensed across the relevant categories can realistically get every one of those seven boxes moving — not as seven disconnected purchases, but as one coordinated plan where each piece is sized correctly against the others.

That coordination matters more than people expect. Life cover sized without reference to your existing debt and dependents is a guess. A retirement annuity contribution set without reference to your investment structure and tax position is a guess. A will drafted without reference to how your retirement funds and life policies actually pay out is a guess. Handled separately, in isolation, each piece might be individually fine — but the plan as a whole is rarely optimised, and gaps between the pieces are exactly where people end up under-insured or over-taxed without realising it.

A common (and reasonable) hesitation people have about financial advisors is the assumption that they're just there to sell you whatever their own company manufactures. That's a fair concern with some advisory models — but it's not how every advisor operates, and it's worth asking directly, for any advisor you're considering, whether they're restricted to one product range or genuinely able to access a broad panel of providers.

This is exactly the position I work from. As a representative of Efficient Wealth — part of the Efficient Group, one of South Africa's larger independent financial advisory networks — my advice isn't built around a single company's in-house product range. Efficient Wealth's model runs on partnerships with a range of specialist product providers alongside its own resources, aiming for the product that actually fits each client rather than whichever one happens to be manufactured in-house. Combined with my broad FSCA authorisation across insurance, investment, retirement, and deposit categories, that means my recommendation in any given area is driven by fit, not by a restricted shelf.

Being more financially literate and more self-directed is a genuinely good shift — it makes for better conversations, not less need for them. But there's a real difference between understanding your options and actually executing a full, coordinated financial plan across seven specialised categories, alone, in a fragmented way. The challenge isn't rhetorical: try it, honestly, and see how far you get in a day.

If you'd rather see what one proper conversation can actually cover, that's exactly the kind of meeting worth booking.