Household

A household is the grouping of related client accounts — a family, a couple, a person and their entities — treated as one relationship for reporting, billing and advice.

The household is the unit a client actually experiences. They do not think of themselves as an IRA, a joint account and a trust; they think of themselves as one financial life, and they expect the person advising them to see it the same way.

Operationally the household is where several things must be decided once rather than repeatedly: the target allocation, the fee schedule and any breakpoint that depends on combined assets, and the risk profile the whole relationship is measured against.

Firms that treat the account as the primary unit tend to discover the cost of it at review time, when somebody has to reassemble a story the system split apart.