We have used Evanson Asset Management since about 2007. Evanson charges a flat fee. I have paid $2,000 per year since I started with them but I believe their minimum annual fee is now $2,500, paid quarterly. Unless you have a crazy amount of accounts and/or trusts, that should be your annual cost. We started with a 1% fee advisor in 2006 (I think) and paying that fee got real old real quick. The % fee concept made no sense to me because the effort by the advisor is the same no matter the actual numbers being used. Luckily, I found Evanson and have been with them ever since. They use primarily DFA mutual funds so if you like to do a lot of buying and selling, this won't work for you. I've never met my planner. We communicate (infrequently) by phone and email. The company doesn't even send out Christmas cards. Bare bones. He's a super-smart nerd and I enjoy talking to him. My husband has to take RMD's so someone from Evanson makes sure we take them every year. He will tell us which account he thinks it should come out of.
As I learned more about managing our portfolio, I debated not using an advisor but my husband would definitely need help if I pre-deceased him so I've kept Evanson. When I was still working, I asked my advisor to review a list of mutual funds from which we had the opportunity to add a fund to the 401(k) line-up at the smaller family-owned business I worked for. He gave some very good advice and I made a nice chunk of money that defrayed the annual fee for about 10 years! All our assets under management are held at Schwab.
My neighbor inherited a couple million dollars from her father when he passed. Both she and her father had been using Wells Fargo advisors and paying their ridiculous fees for years. She showed me her dad's statements a couple of times before he passed and I saw some very shady stuff going on. She is 100% clueless about managing a portfolio and gets freaked out when I ask her questions. One day, we called her broker and she put the call on speakerphone so I could ask some questions. They had no good answers for my questions. They made one move that cost her dad $100,000 in taxes and raised his Medicare IRMAA. I was livid and tried to get her to at least do a call with my planner but she's afraid to change. At least Wells Fargo dropped the fee from 1% to .6% because they were afraid they were going to lose the account because of the questions they were getting. It still raises my blood pressure when I think about them still managing her money.
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