Justifying charging 1% fee
40 RepliesJump to last post
You are extremely naive. With hourly billing, you need to find a way to make every hour that you work a billable hour or you lose revenue. That's a huge conflict. If you practice isn't busting out at the seems, you need to work more slowly or you lose revenue. That's a huge conflict. Hourly fees can mean that smaller clients get a much smaller benefit per dollar. That's a huge conflict. All modes of compensation have conflicts. The only good way to minimize conflicts is for the advisor to be fiancially secure. In this manner, it never matters what a specific client does or does not do. Before you take another step down the path of hourly billing, determine if it is even possible to support your family in this manner. I think that the odds will be very stacked against you.thanks guys for all your answers its an interesting debate, Uderstand I am not criticizing anyone just trying to understand and learn, I am new to this and in the process of structuring my compensation schedule and want to do the right thing, BTW the reason hourly billing can be looked as morally superior, is that it TOTALLY takes away the conflict of interest, same argument fee only planning make against commisions that there is a conflict of interest to recomend products that make the broker more commision, Can be argued against fee, There is a interest to get client to invest with you to earn the 1% when maybe client would be better off leaving his money somewhere else
thanks guys for all your answers its an interesting debate, Uderstand I am not criticizing anyone just trying to understand and learn, I am new to this and in the process of structuring my compensation schedule and want to do the right thing, BTW the reason hourly billing can be looked as morally superior, is that it TOTALLY takes away the conflict of interest, same argument fee only planning make against commisions that there is a conflict of interest to recomend products that make the broker more commision, Can be argued against fee, There is a interest to get client to invest with you to earn the 1% when maybe client would be better off leaving his money somewhere else
Conflict for an hourly biller - take your time and you can rack up some money. For instance, in cases where I do hourly billing (usually for planning services or unique financial situations), I bill in six minute increments. Every email is 12 minutes. Every phone call is at least six minutes. And so on and so forth. I have a billing sheet that sits on my desk for just those calls. Send a lot of emails needing clarification - could be a conflict. Why didn't I just write it down on one? Make a phone call - there's some too. Your case will probably take me about ten hours to complete. But I finished in seven, do I give the rest of the retainer back, or do I simply try to find other ways to "tweak" the plan.
No one case is morally superior to the other. You can make an argument for any form of compensation. I thought this as well. I try to eliminate as many conflicts as possible, but there will always be some.
thanks guys for all your answers its an interesting debate, Uderstand I am not criticizing anyone just trying to understand and learn, I am new to this and in the process of structuring my compensation schedule and want to do the right thing, BTW the reason hourly billing can be looked as morally superior, is that it TOTALLY takes away the conflict of interest, same argument fee only planning make against commisions that there is a conflict of interest to recomend products that make the broker more commision, Can be argued against fee, There is a interest to get client to invest with you to earn the 1% when maybe client would be better off leaving his money somewhere else
Where else? I can hold almost anything in a fee account... Also the hourly doesn't eliminate anything, because you will need to set future appoints to generate the income(and you don't know how the portfolio is doing because you aren't monitoring each individual portfolio is you are an hourly planner)
Wouldn't the interest be in both parties favor? You'd have more of an interest to make the client more money because that 1% will be more if the client grows 15% as opposed to 5%. Ya dig? Plus you wouldn't have to deal with the moaning and groaning of the client when you tell them you have to bill them for the phone call asking if they can send you a statement so you can review the account they have at E-Trade that you are "advising" them on.There is a interest to get client to invest with you to earn the 1% when maybe client would be better off leaving his money somewhere else
[quote=BioFreeze] [quote=B24]Actually, I do know what I’m talking about. First off, I said a few CPA’s, as in maybe 3 or so. Add to that some preparers and checkers, and there you go. I have a friend who is an EA. She bangs out 800 with no other registered (CPA or EA) people in her office. She has 3 preparers and 3 checkers. She’s not doing most of the heavy lifting herself. I know a 3-man office that does about 500 (one CPA, two preparers).
Don't know whether it's the norm or the exception, I just know it's being done.[/quote]It's the exception. The only people who can accomplish this are people that are known only to you.
[/quote] I guess that makes me special
Nobody ever complained when they meet or exceed the markets returns. They get antsy when the market is down, and the fees are glaring at them. Someone mentioned earlier that we save them from themselves…market down 40% they are dow 18% or something to that effect. I use that often when I get the occasional whiner. I have even pulled up an old morningstar to show the results the way they did it, if left how it was when they came to me. I then never hear the questions again.
On a side note, Oblama may force us all with his heavy hand to raise fees and begin to price folks out of the market. More inept congressional regulation might get dirty and nail thinning profit margins. I never got hired by a poor person.Most of my clients are under 1% fee.
Anything under $100,000 is 1% my max fee. I just do not have the over head to have to charge anything higher. I make a nice profit at 1% since I am indy.[quote=Greenbacks]Most of my clients are under 1% fee.
Anything under $100,000 is 1% my max fee. I just do not have the over head to have to charge anything higher. I make a nice profit at 1% since I am indy. [/quote] How much do ticket charges cost you per buy and sell? Ours are $15 per buy and $15 per sell, so if we have a $100,000 account with 8 funds/stocks and we do 5 buys and 5 sells over the course of a year, theres $150 down the drain and 15% of the 1% fee, not to mention the 15% off the top with having only an 85% payout.Yea we pay for the ticket charges. The only thing we don't pay the charges for is in SMA's of course, and the Ameriprise version of Jones's Advisory Solutions.
[quote=ambitious]Question for all you fee only planners out there, In the last couple of years the wind has been blowing in favor of fee only planning vs commision as being morally superior,
So if you are an ADVISOR vs BROKER how do you justify charging 1% or even more commision of AUM, I can understand you deserve to be compensated for your work & expertise, however you should charge for WORK by the hour why are you different than any other professionals accountants etc, that charge by the hour no matter how wealthy the client, Why would you charge somone worth ten mil, 100 grand a yr vs net worth 500000, only 5000 a yr if theorticaly you could be doing the same amount of hours work.[/quote]People have already said it but I'll say it again. More money means more hand holding and higher maintenance, thus more payment to the Advisor. I can't stand the whole "fee-only" garbage and hourly planning crap. On a side note, just saw an article in FA mag that one of the former president's of NAPFA got caught with stealing client assets. Way to go with the ethics!
[quote=3rdyrp2]
Yea we pay for the ticket charges. The only thing we don’t pay the charges for is in SMA’s of course, and the Ameriprise version of Jones’ Advisory Solutions.
[/quote]I believe AMP lets you implement block trading to reduce ticket charges once you meet the requirements for PWA. We are close to qualifying so I can’t say for sure.We’re 9 $1 million client’s away from PWA status, with about 3 attainable in the next 6-12 months, so we’ve got a ways to go.
[quote=B24]I forget who said it, but I personally agree that the client is getting more than 1% worth of us when they lose less than they would have in a down market. And you can’t fall back on the “mutual funds never beat the market, so don’t pay a fee” crap. Most people can’t/won’t allocate properly, so they end up blowing themselves up. Let’s say you have a retiree with $1mm in his nest egg, and instead of him losing 35% last year (and I heard of a lot of people like this losing 65-70% during the dot-com bust), he only lost 15% or 20%. You just saved him $200-250,000.
I agree with your comments and would add that by saving my clients 15-20% last year, we have beat the market and will do so going forward on an annualized basis.
Before I became an advisor I was in trading and the primary thing I learned there was risk management; if you don’t preserve your capital, you can’t trade another day.
The same goes for our clients; if we manage their money by focusing on the downside risk first and outperform in down market years, then the long run our annualized results will beat the markets—convincingly.
Everyone thinks of ‘beating the market’ in terms of achieving higher gains in the good years; however, preserving capital/limiting losses has a much, much greater long term impact than outsize gains.
My point exactly! Client should have a choice between fee and brokerage which a “fee only” planner can’t give them.
Says who? A "fee only" planner can charge in a number of ways. Mr. Client, do you want to pay for every trade we make? Ok, well here is the "fee" for that. Mr. Client, do you want to just pay me a flat fee every year no matter what your assets do? Ok, here is the fee. Mr. Client, do you want to pay me a percentage of assets under management fee, so that as you make more money, I make more money, and if you lose money, so do I? Ok, here is what we charge for that.
There's always a choice. It's all about how you structure your ADV as a "fee only planner".
There are conflicts everywhere, but a "fee only" planner has a lot more flexibility than you think.
[quote=AGEMAN]A big hole that I see in the fee only approach is that some assets should not be charged a fee. For instance a client has a stock he knows he never wants to sell so why pay a fee only planner a fee to hold this stock. I like to freedom to be able to offer both fee and brokerage choices to clients and place the appropriate assets where they serve the clients best interests. [/quote]
It’s very simple. We separate that stock out as an unsupervised asset. The client doesn’t pay for it, and we don’t look at it.