Cost
Ask a client what they pay for advice and they will name your fee correctly. Ask what they pay in total and very few can answer.
Ask a client with a million dollars what they pay for advice. A well-served client will name your advisory fee, and they will name it correctly, because it is on the agreement and it appears on the statement.
Then ask what they pay in total. Very few can answer, and the reason is not that anyone hid anything. It is that the total is assembled from three or four places that no single document brings together.
Each is disclosed. The sum is not. And the sum is what the client actually pays.
Cost has moved from a thing advisers should consider to a thing regulators have said in writing that they must. The SEC's interpretation of the adviser standard of conduct is explicit that cost is a factor in whether advice can be believed to be in a client's best interest — not the only factor, and not a mandate to recommend the cheapest thing, but a factor that has to be weighed rather than assumed.
The practical consequence is that "our fee is one percent" is no longer a complete answer to a question about cost, and a proposal that treats it as one is describing a fraction of the number.
A client hears 1.7% all-in and files it under small. The same client hears seventeen thousand dollars a year and has an entirely different reaction, because one of those is a number they have to earn and the other is a rounding error in a sentence.
Both belong in the proposal. Percentage for comparison, dollars for comprehension, computed at this client's actual account size rather than a generic illustration.
And then the one almost nobody shows: the cumulative figure over the client's horizon, with the gross and net paths side by side. Over twenty-five years the difference between a portfolio compounding gross and the same portfolio compounding net of all-in cost is not a line item. It is a number that changes what people decide.
Advisors resist this, and the resistance is honest rather than cynical. Nobody wants the biggest, scariest number in their proposal to be their own compensation.
Here is the case for putting it there anyway.
The client will see that number eventually. It is arithmetic; anyone with a spreadsheet and a grievance can produce it, and several categories of competitor produce it as their entire marketing strategy. What you control is not whether the client sees it. It is whether they see it from you, in context, next to what they get for it — or from someone whose only goal is to make it look indefensible.
There is also a second-order effect worth naming. An advisor who shows the full cost, unprompted, has made a claim about their own conduct that is expensive to fake. Clients read it correctly. It is the cheapest trust you will ever buy, and it costs you a conversation you were going to have anyway, just on worse terms and later.
If a recommendation includes a proprietary product, or the firm receives revenue sharing, or a strategist pays for shelf space, that disclosure belongs adjacent to the cost it relates to.
Not in an appendix. Not incorporated by reference to a document delivered at onboarding. On the page where the client is looking at what they pay.
The test is simple and unforgiving: if a client learned about the arrangement later and felt it had been technically disclosed rather than actually disclosed, the placement was wrong. That feeling is what arbitration panels are asked to evaluate, and "it was in the brochure" has a mixed record.
One page. The advisory fee and the client's effective rate. The weighted average expense ratio of what they will hold. Platform and program fees. The all-in figure in percent and in dollars at this account size. The cumulative dollar cost over the stated horizon and the gross-versus-net terminal difference. Any third-party compensation, disclosed right there.
That page is harder to walk into a meeting with. It is also the page that ends the fee conversation permanently instead of deferring it to a year when performance is bad.
We are not publishing how the weighted average is derived across mandates, how the net-of-fee paths are constructed, or how platform and program costs are attributed at the household level.
What is worth saying in public is the standard. Every proposal we produce carries the all-in number, in both percent and dollars, at the client's actual size, with the horizon effect shown — and the conflicts disclosed on the page where the money is, not the page nobody reaches.
Questions this did not answer? Ask them directly — that is what the twenty minutes is for.
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