I believe that achieving the clarity you crave is near impossible without developing a thoughtful financial roadmap.

For new clients, I will rarely manage their money without first creating a plan, as making recommendations without fully understanding who you are and what’s most important to you can lead to sub-optimal results.

Planning fees are billed at $300 per hour and plans typically range from $2,000-$4,000 depending on complexity.

Note that new clients will always know their plan cost upfront when they accept their planning proposal. No hidden fees or surprises.

Existing investment management clients do not pay additional financial planning fees, except under extraordinary circumstances. Regular plan updates, proactive tax & income planning are all included in their annual management fee.

There are generally two fees clients pay when investing with an adviser:

1. Adviser’s Management Fee

Acacia Grove uses a blended fee schedule, which you can view in the section below. As you can see from our blended schedule, everyone pays the same fee on the first $500,000 of assets under our management. As you trust us to manage more of your money, the fee on the additional dollars decreases.

Why have we structured our schedule this way? Simply, whether we are working with a client who has $2,000,000 or $4,000,000, the baseline planning, investment, tax and retirement income analysis is done with the same level of care for all Acacia Grove clients. Structuring our fee schedule this way ensures that all clients pay the same fee on the first $500,000. Those who trust us to manage more of their resources are able to access cheaper fees on the higher dollars, as it does not take us double the amount of time to manage $4,000,000 versus $2,000,000 once the initial planning and investment analysis have been performed.

In keeping with our focus on transparency and no hidden surprises, all advisory fees are easily seen in dollars on the quarterly statements of your accounts.

2. Underlying Fund Expense Ratios

The underlying funds and ETF’s in which Acacia Grove chooses to invest our clients’ money generally all charge a fee to manage those funds. This is called an expense ratio.

Unlike the adviser’s management fees, this fee is not seen by the client on a quarterly statement, as fund performance is reported after fees. For example, if a fund gains 10% in a year and charges a 0.5% annual fee, the fund will report an annual return of 9.5%.

As expenses are one of the few variables in the investment world that we can control, we work really hard to construct portfolios with low internal fees, primarily utilizing low cost ETF’s.

Note that Acacia Grove does not generate any revenue from trading and our clients do not pay the trading costs when trades are made. This way, our clients know that if we recommend a trade, it is because we truly believe that it is in their best interest, not because we benefit in any way from the trade that is being recommended.