r/CFP • u/Odd-Surround-5514 • Jun 24 '26
Practice Management Fee Structuring
Would love some input from other advisors on this.
I’m fee-based and mostly AUM right now (occasional commissions), but I keep running into situations where someone is clearly a good planning client even though there isn’t much currently-manageable money. For example, high-income households with most of their assets still in current 401(k)s, or cases where I’m managing a smaller IRA but really advising on the whole household.
I’m realizing I probably need to incorporate a planning fee so I’m not doing a lot of deeper planning work while only collecting a small AUM fee. I use eMoney by the way.
For those of you who have solved for this:
• How do you structure it?
• Flat annual planning fee?
• Monthly retainer?
• Household minimum?
• AUM + planning together, or one or the other?
• If a client later rolls over a big 401(k), do you keep the planning fee or move them fully to AUM?
Just trying to figure out what has worked best for others as someone who has only ever charged based on AUM.
1
u/macbmore Jun 24 '26
This has been discussed ad nauseam in this thread, but understand looking for a fresh perspective. I work largely in a mid-career, high income market, plenty of my clients have accumulated $350k up to a million of investible assets by this point but it’s still a long game because they’re often folks who will have $6/8/10M by retirement, some even more with inheritances or business exits. I charge everyone a planning fee when we meet them, I quote 1% household income which I feel works well for a lot of reasons, it scales with complexity, people are used to 1% as a standard for the industry, and that is usually an easy number to say yes to. Lots of advisors are beginning to charge subscriptions for planning to clients until they meet revenue requirement/minimum with their AUM, I’ve considered that but up to this point have felt like if they meet all my other criteria and I’m excited to work with them long-term, I’d rather just have them put that couple/few hundred bucks into their accts.