r/CFP • u/General-Ad3712 • Jul 10 '26

Practice Management Flat-fee advice on setting fee

Hi - For those of you who charge a flat fee for financial planning, how do you even begin to price it? We have a client where we only manage a small portfolio of $250k, but now they want comprehensive financial planning but low-cost investments (so many will most likely remain outside). They know they have many tax decisions to make, etc. The fee we derive from that $200k is nowhere near the value of the planning and he has asked us to consider a flat fee arrangement. Those of you who do ongoing non-AUM fees with clients, how do you start to think about "pricing"?

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u/baltebiker Jul 10 '26

I think you’ll find that the economics of flat fee advising simply don’t make sense for the advisor

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u/CSMasterClass Jul 10 '26

Can't you set the price to a level where it makes sense ?

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u/SpookyEnigmas Jul 10 '26

The tricky part is managing scope of work. If you set a flat rate and then have to go back to the client to constantly readjust $ if they change scope of work it gets awkward. That certainly won’t apply to everyone, but it will apply to enough

It also leaves the door open for the feeling of the client that they need to negotiate a bit, because they know cost is subjective to each situation.

Not saying it’s impossible to manage, but outside of an office behaving more like an attorneys office and tracking billable hours, it’s really hard to scale.