High costs, packaged advice and lack of transparency have been problems in the financial services industry for decades. That has slowly been changing this century. About 1 in 5 of us now offer a more rigorous fiduciary standard that aligns services and fees with your interests.
What is a Fee-Only Adviser?
A fee-only financial advisor gets no commissions for the investment products used in your portfolio or for trading. Fee-only advisors do not accept commissions so that we can avoid inherent conflicts of interest that salespeople have.
Fee-only financial planners and financial advisors are compensated for the informed, independent and objective financial advice that is provided. We are compensated based upon a percentage of assets under management, hourly fees or a flat-fee.
Bluemound is a Registered Investment Adviser working on a fee-only basis sitting on the same side of the table as you. I seek to objectively cull the vast amounts of information constantly bombarding you today. I have focused the firm on being a low-cost provider of investment management in order to help more drop to your bottom line.
When you do better, I do better. When you lose money, I take an automatic pay cut. I don’t like pay cuts.
What Is A Fiduciary
Bluemound Asset Management adheres to a fiduciary standard. A fiduciary is a person or organization that acts on behalf of another person or persons to manage assets. A fiduciary is required to act in your best interests.
A fiduciary’s responsibilities or duties are both ethical and legal. When I accept being a fiduciary on your behalf, then I am required to act your best interest. This is what is known as a “prudent person standard of care,” a standard that originally stems from an 1830 court ruling.
Recently, the Department of Labor distinguished between fiduciary and non-fiduciary financial professionals with regards to retirement plans. The initial thrust of the law was for all financial professionals working on retirement plans to be fiduciaries. However, push back by the established big financial industry players got that rule changed in 2018.
As a result, most financial advisors handling or consulting on retirement plans are non-fiduciaries, meaning they are not required to act in your best interest and adhere to lower standards. Brokers, insurance agents and other financial advisors operate by what is called the Suitability Standard which simply means they can’t overtly rip you off, which allows them to operate in ethical gray zones.
As a fiduciary, I believe I am better suited to consult on your retirement and overall investing because that eliminates the conflict of interest. It pays to understand the difference between fiduciary and non-fiduciary advisors.
Consider These Thoughts
Consumer Reports: “Watch out for sales commissions and conflict of interests. Consumer Reports continues to believe the Fee-Only planners remain your best option.”
Newsweek Magazine/Washington Post: Jane Bryant Quinn: “Financial Planners who take commissions have a built-in conflict of interest… even with disclosure, my choice would be a fee-only planner.
AARP: “You can be sure that a fee-only planner won’t try and sell you an investment just to earn a commission.”
Who Can You Trust With Your Money? – AARP
Here’s how to understand your financial adviser’s conflicts of interest – MarketWatch
Contact me to talk about a low cost, fee-only, fiduciary, registered investment advisor relationship.
