Fee Rates
We benchmark our fees periodically to make sure we believe this statement to be true:
We are not expensive and you do not want cheap.
Given the breadth and depth of our expertise, the attentiveness of our service staff, and ever-present fiduciary duty to our clients, our fees are more than fair.
With cheap, you get what you pay for – typically superficial (if any) real financial planning, conflicted implementation, cookie cutter approaches, a lack of proactivity, limited responsiveness, limited scope, limited depth of thinking, limited expertise, and people who usually owe their allegiance to a third party and often don’t really know you.
Each client is unique, so fees must be determined by each situation. Prospective clients receive an outline of the services to be provided and the associated fees.
Clients with more than $1,000,000 in investment assets, regardless of what types of accounts are owned or at which financial institutions the accounts are held, pay us less than 1% per year. “Investment assets” are things such as stocks, bonds, options, mutual funds, ETFs, REITs, closed-end funds, UITs, and all types of deferred annuities. (We do not count real estate holdings or personal assets like furnishings, cars, and jewelry).
For clients with less than $1,000,000 in investment assets, 1% annually is the most common rate.
Typically, we are engaged on an asset based fee, although alternate arrangements such as a flat project fee, an annual fee, or hourly consulting fee are available if better suited to the work.