General Advice vs Personal Advice: The Explainer Clients Never Read Until It Matters

Here's the conversation almost every adviser has had at least once: a client makes a decision based on something they read on a blog or heard on a podcast, assumes it was "advice", and is genuinely surprised to learn it wasn't advice for them at all. That's not the client being careless — it's the industry doing a poor job of explaining a distinction that's actually pretty simple once someone walks you through it. 💖

What most practices get wrong

• Assuming the warning does the explaining — a line of fine print at the bottom of an article doesn't teach anyone what general advice actually means.
• Using the distinction defensively instead of helpfully — it reads as a disclaimer to protect the practice, not as something written to actually help the reader.
• Burying it in legal language — "this does not constitute personal advice having regard to your objectives, financial situation or needs" is accurate and useless to a non-adviser skimming a blog.
• Never explaining it outside the warning itself — clients hear the distinction for the first time when something's already gone slightly sideways, not before.
• Treating every piece of content the same way — a general explainer and a tailored recommendation in a review meeting aren't the same thing and shouldn't read the same way.

Drop that near your blog footer, your webinar sign-up, or as its own short page linked from both. Now here's how three different practices put it to work.

Where the line actually sits

The test isn't the topic, it's whether your personal circumstances were considered. A blog post about how downsizer contributions generally work is general advice, no matter how specific and well-researched it is, because it wasn't built around any one reader's super balance, age or goals. The moment an adviser factors in a named client's actual numbers and says "here's what I'd recommend for you", that's personal advice, and it has to be delivered — and documented — as such. Content, webinars, seminars and general market commentary sit on the general-advice side of that line by design; one-on-one meetings built on a completed fact-find sit on the personal-advice side. Keeping that line visible to clients, not just accurate in your compliance manual, is the actual job here.

Mistakes to avoid

• Copying someone else's disclaimer wording verbatim — it should sound like your practice talking to your clients, not a template.
• Making it sound apologetic — the distinction is a genuinely useful thing to know, not something to be sheepish about explaining.
• Forgetting to explain it verbally, not just in writing — webinars and seminars need the spoken version too, not just a slide people skim past.
• Leaving it static while your content grows — as you add more content formats (video, social, newsletters), check the explainer is linked from each one, not just the blog.

Frequently asked questions

Is general advice basically a loophole to avoid giving real advice?

No — it's a genuine regulatory category, not a workaround. General advice exists because a lot of useful financial information doesn't need to be tailored to be useful, and requiring every webinar or article to become personal advice would make it impossible to publish anything at all. The category isn't the problem; not explaining it clearly to clients is.

Can a client ask a question in a general-advice setting and get a personal answer back?

If an adviser starts factoring in that specific client's circumstances to answer, the conversation has moved into personal-advice territory, even informally — which is exactly the moment to say so out loud ("let's book you in properly so I can actually look at your numbers") rather than answering on the spot in a group setting.

Does this explainer need to be reviewed by compliance before it goes on our website?

Yes — treat it as regulatory-adjacent content and have whoever handles your compliance review sign off on the final wording, the same as any other disclosure-related page, even though it's written in plain English rather than legal language.

Will explaining this clearly actually change client behaviour, or is it just a nice-to-have?

Honest nuance: it reduces confusion and complaints at the margin, but it won't stop every client from occasionally conflating the two — some people will always treat a confident blog post as if it were advice for them specifically, no matter how clearly it's labelled. The explainer lowers that risk and gives you a clear, documented, good-faith effort to have told them; it doesn't eliminate it.

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