How a Flat-Fee, Independent, Fiduciary Financial Advisor Benefits You
By Jared Andreoli, CFP®, CSLP®
I am a firm believer that a great financial advisor can offer enormous value for their clients. They can help you manage your investments (and eliminate emotional mistakes), enact positive financial strategies at the beginning of your career, and help you achieve your financial goals (which is one of the main reasons I became a financial advisor).
But I don’t think you should simply work with any financial planner. There are over 300,000 financial advisors in the U.S., and the reality is that some will be better fits to serve you than others. In this post, we’ll describe why working with a flat-fee, independent, fiduciary financial advisor is important, what all those terms mean, and how it can benefit you.
Puts Your Interests First
Unfortunately, it is far too common for people to be taken advantage of by people that they trusted. When working with a financial advisor, a high level of trust on both ends is necessary to make the type of progress you desire. To ensure that you get the type of service you want, and work with a high-quality advisor you can trust, I recommend that you work with an independent, fiduciary financial advisor.
As a fiduciary advisor I am under a legal (and ethical) obligation to put my clients’ interests ahead of my own. Working in our clients’ best interest is a fundamental value of ours, and we wouldn’t have it any other way. We’ve even created our own Fiduciary Statement that details how we will act, and we also include a clause in our client agreements in which we agree to work as a fiduciary.
As an independent advisor, the guidance I offer my clients is objective and unbiased because I am not tied to any particular financial company or investment firm. In everything we do for our clients, they can be assured that the advice they receive is what we genuinely believe is best for them, and is not influenced by any quotas, commissions, or kickbacks.
Flat-Fee Transparency
With over 300,000 financial advisors in the U.S., there are bound to be various models of compensation. While we won’t get into every type here, we do believe it’s important that your advisor should be able to clearly answer the question “How are you compensated?”
We offer our services for a transparent flat fee that starts at $4,800 per year. These fees, which are set at the beginning of the relationship and recalculated every other year, includes our investment management services.
One potential benefit of a flat-fee arrangement is that your fee isn’t tied to the growth of your investment accounts. For instance, if you were paying a fee based on your asset size, the more your assets grow, the more your fee would grow. With our services, that wouldn’t be the case, and could save you money in the long run.
Personalized Advice Based on Your Unique Experience
At Simplicity Financial, we believe it’s important to have a specialty in our work so that we can best help our clients. Naturally, that means that we can’t serve everyone. Retirees, for instance, have a number of issues that a financial advisor can help them with. Yet they wouldn’t benefit from our services because we don’t focus on the type of challenges they face.
In the same way, there are a number of advisors who may not focus on the particular career challenges you face as a physician; they may not understand student loans with as much depth as you need, or they may not have a comprehensive array of services with the goal of achieving your financial goals. At our firm, that’s exactly what we specialize in!
When choosing to work with a financial advisor, I highly recommend you work with a specialist who knows the unique challenges you face—in all areas of your life—and can help you create a plan that matches your financial and lifestyle goals.
Ready to Create Your Financial Plan?
If you are a physician, fellow, or resident and are ready to develop a financial road map to achieve your financial goals, we’d love to help. We have built our business based on trust, mutual respect, and always doing the right thing for our clients.
If you think Simplicity Financial would be a good fit to partner with you on your financial journey, get started by scheduling a free consultation, or reach out to us by email at jared.andreoli@simplicityfinancialllc.com or by calling 414-207-6473.
About Jared
Jared Andreoli, CFP®, CSLP®, is president and financial planner at Simplicity Financial, a fee-only RIA dedicated to helping early-career physicians conceptualize their financial picture and achieve their financial goals. Jared specializes in devising individualized financial road maps for clients, and he loves nothing more than a full day meeting with clients who value his partnership to solve problems—big and small.
After college, Jared spent six years working as a mutual fund administrator for a large company. While he learned an immense amount about the financial world, he was missing the personal connection of working with individual clients. Combining his passion for finance and personal connection, he established Simplicity Financial in 2017.
Jared has a degree in finance with a concentration in financial planning from Western Kentucky University, along with the CERTIFIED FINANCIAL PLANNER™ (CFP®) and a Certified Student Loan Planner (CSLP®) certifications. Outside of work Jared enjoys cooking and traveling. He played baseball in college and still coaches occasionally. He and his wife recently welcomed a daughter, who occupies most of their time. To learn more about Jared, connect with him on LinkedIn.