How your financial adviser is paid shapes the advice you receive more than almost anything else, and the industry uses three similar-sounding terms, fee-only, fee-based, and commission, that are easy to confuse and important to tell apart.
A commission-based adviser is paid by the products they sell you. The advice may be perfectly sound, but the compensation creates an obvious tension: the recommendation that pays the adviser most is not always the one that serves you best. That tension is not a character flaw. It is structural, and the honest response to it is disclosure, not denial.
A fee-only adviser is paid only by you, typically a percentage of assets managed or a flat or hourly fee, and receives no commissions from product sales. This is the arrangement with the fewest built-in conflicts, because the adviser's pay does not depend on which products you buy. It is not automatically cheaper in every case, but the incentives point in a single direction: yours.
Fee-based sits between the two and is the most misunderstood, because the name sounds like fee-only. A fee-based adviser charges advisory fees and may also receive commissions on certain products, such as insurance. That is not inherently wrong, and it can be the right structure when a client genuinely needs both advice and products. What matters is that the arrangement is disclosed plainly, so you know when you are paying a fee and when a commission is in play.
Greenridge Wealth is fee-based, not fee-only, and acts as a fiduciary on the investment advice it provides; affiliate insurance commissions are disclosed. We say that in the same breath as the definition, because the point of explaining the difference is to be clear about where we sit.
Ask how your adviser is paid. The answer is the advice behind the advice.