NerdWallet's Smart Money Podcast - Stop Living by One-Size-Fits-All Budgets — and Paying for One-Size-Fits-All Financial Advice

Episode Date: August 11, 2025

Understand how to assess when financial advisor fees are worth it and how to rethink personal finance rules that don’t serve you. What are the different financial advisor fees, and how can you decide if they’re worth it? Do you need to follow traditional budgeting and debt payoff rules to be financially successful? Hosts Sean Pyles and Elizabeth Ayoola answer a listener’s question about how to navigate financial advisor fees. But first, personal finance Nerd Kim Palmer joins the show to share her conversation with Dana Miranda, author of You Don’t Need a Budget, about why certain traditional budgeting frameworks may not be the right fit for everyone. Dana offers tips on experimenting with spending plans, prioritizing comfort over rigid rules, and how to reframe emergency funds as tools for opportunity, not just crisis. Then, Sean and Elizabeth welcome James Bashall, financial advisor at NerdWallet Wealth Partners, to answer a listener’s question about financial advisor fees, from AUM-based and fixed-fee models to fiduciary vs. suitability standards. They explain what high and low fees look like, what credentials to look for in an advisor, and when paying a premium might actually bring peace of mind (or not). Take the Smart Money Podcast Listener Survey 2025 and enter to win a prize! https://nerdwallet.com/podsurvey  NerdWallet Wealth Partners is a fiduciary online financial advisor, offering low-cost, comprehensive financial advice and investment management: https://nerdwalletwealthpartners.com/  Want us to review your budget? Fill out this form — completely anonymously if you want — and we might feature your budget in a future segment! https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScK53yAufsc4v5UpghhVfxtk2MoyooHzlSIRBnRxUPl3hKBig/viewform?usp=header In their conversation, the Nerds discuss: financial advisor fees, when are financial advisor fees worth it, fiduciary vs suitability standard, how much does a financial advisor cost, AUM fee structure, fee-based vs fee-only advisors, how to hire a financial advisor, certified financial planner vs financial advisor, financial advisor credentials CFP, what is a fiduciary, what is AUM, robo advisor vs human advisor, average financial advisor fee, high financial advisor fees, passive vs active investing, index funds vs mutual funds, how to choose a financial advisor, budgeting rules that don’t work, 50/30/20 budget rule, Dana Miranda budget book, alternative to emergency fund, comfort fund vs emergency fund, financial triage, how to compare financial advisors, intuitive spending, what is intuitive spending, understanding investment fees, best financial advisor structure, how to spot hidden advisor fees, shopping for a financial advisor, emotional benefits of financial planning, and pros and cons of robo advisors. To send the Nerds your money questions, call or text the Nerd hotline at 901-730-6373 or email [e-mail]. Like what you hear? Please leave us a review and tell a friend. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

If you love free stuff, this message is for you. We're always looking for ways to improve the podcast, which is why, right now, we're giving out prizes for seven lucky winners who fill out our listener survey. It only takes a few minutes, and you'll be entered to win some really cool prizes. One winner will get a pair of Sony ULT Wireless Noise Canceling Headphones. And six winners will get the Bagu Cloud Carry-on bag. And full disclosure, I have one of these bags, and it's one of my favorite travel bags. Just go to nerdwollet.com slash pod survey and complete the form by September.

15th for a chance to win. You can read the official rules from more details, which again can be found at nerdwollet.com slash pod survey. Thank you and good luck. One of the first people I learned about investing from was Warren Buffett. So I opted to invest in low-cost index funds and I didn't bother with the financial advisor because of the fees, to be honest. Present me is realizing that maybe paying fees isn't so bad after all. Well, sometimes those fees are well worth paying, Elizabeth. So this episode, we're going to give a rundown of different financial advisor fees and when it's worth paying them. Welcome to Nerd Wallet's Smart Money Podcast, where you send us your questions about your money,

and we tap our vast pool of nerdy knowledge to answer them. I'm Sean Piles. And I'm Elizabeth Ayala. On this episode of our amazing podcast, we answer listeners' question about financial advisor fees. How do they work? How much should you pay? and how can you avoid paying too much? But first, it's book club time. This is our semi-regular series where personal finance nerd Kimberly Palmer speaks with authors of new and interesting finance books.

Hey, Kim, who are you talking with this time? Our guest today is Dana Miranda, author of You Don't Need a Budget. It's a newly released book about money that offers some unconventional views I found really intriguing. We'll talk to Dana about whether we really need to pay our bills, pay off debt, or even save for an emergency.

Sounds great. We also want to remind listeners that you can enter for a chance to win our book giveaway sweepstakes at nerdwollet.com slash book club for our next book club pick. And with that, Kim, I'll let you take things from here. Great. Thank you. Dana, welcome to our show. Thanks so much for having me. Here at NerdWallet, we talk a lot about budgets, especially the concept of the 50, 30, 30, 20, 20 budget where you aim to have 50% of your take home pay going towards needs, 30% towards wants, and 20% toward debt payments, beyond the minimums, and savings. So are you saying that is all wrong? I don't think that the way anyone chooses to manage their money is wrong, but the premise of you don't need a budget is to question the advice that you're hearing because we so often are hearing one-size-fits-all advice that really doesn't fit everybody. And it ignores a lot of individual circumstances, which is really what drives our relationships

with money, everybody's situation is very unique and very nuanced. And so the advice that we offer and the way that we as individuals read that advice needs to take those nuances into consideration and understand sort of what is driving the advice, maybe who that advice is written for, and how does that fit into your plan in your life? Something like the 50, 30, 20 budget is really meant to simplify money management so that you're not doing this every dollar, has a job kind of money plan. You're not constantly tracking every expense, every bit of spending that you do. And that's a really good goal to work toward, I think, but offering that kind of prescription without addressing the nuances that might exist in people's lives, often rather than

feeling like a guideline can feel like a way for someone to judge themselves and then to feel ashamed if they're not meeting, usually that 20% savings plan that is part of that budget. And I think it's really important to kind of understand where that comes from. That plan was also never meant to be a budget. It was a set of guidelines for managing money in the original book that it came from. And it was also that included a lot more nuance and a lot more flexibility on what might work in your life. And it's sort of been taken and spread throughout the personal finance space as a set of rules for people to follow, because it's a little easier to sort of proliferate that way. So what does that mean if someone's thinking about,

okay, how should I think about how I'm spending my money? Does everyone just have to kind of figure that out their own custom approach, or are there any general guidelines we can live by? I don't think that there are general guidelines that we can give people for how to spend your money. What I try to do in you don't need a budget and with my work in general is to offer questions for people and experiments, and I really frame them as experiments, like if you want to try experimenting with a 50, 20, 30 plan for a while, try that and see how it fits in your life, adjust it, see how that works. But more often, I think it's more important to get a basic understanding of how our financial products and systems work. So usually our debt products,

our banking, things like that, how those work and how they can fit into our lives. And Then just work from a set of questions about how do you want money to support you day to day, you know, this month, this year, in the long term, and what kind of steps can you take if those steps are accessible to you to support those goals? There are some other aspects of conventional money wisdom that you really turn on their head as well. I want to get into some of those. So first of all, you say you might not have to pay off your debt or even pay all your bills. Can you explain what you mean by that?

Sure. And I'll start with the debt. That really gets to, like I was saying, understanding how your financial products work. And I guess bills sort of works the same way. So basically when you're being asked to pay off a debt or you being asked to pay a bill, that's some kind of provider telling you that you owe money. That's a financial commitment that you have made of some kind. And not paying that or paying it or paying it late or whatever, however you might

handle that comes with different consequences. And what I think is really important for people to understand is start with knowing what those consequences are. So the consequence of not paying a certain bill might be having a utility turned off, right? Not paying a debt bill might be accruing interest. Those are very different things. So if you need to prioritize because you don't have the money to pay them both on time, you need to understand what are the consequences of those and make your financial decisions that way. There are also consequences, especially with rapid debt payoff, when you're putting extra money toward debt payoff, the consequence of that

is that you're not putting it towards something else. So saving for some other thing in your life or spending on some other thing in your life. And so you have to decide, is that consequence worth having your debt paid off faster? And I think it's important to, again, ask those questions and make those decisions for yourself and think about how that actually plays into your individual life, rather than just sort of taking the set of rules about paying off debt as quickly as possible, and especially being impacted by the shame that our culture puts on carrying debt. Yeah, the way I read that section of your book, too, is thinking, okay, if you have a medical bill and you feel like, okay, of course, you feel pressure to pay that, then you also have your rent

and your food. And I read that section of your book as saying, it's okay to prioritize your essential needs, it might make sense for you in that moment to put your food and your rent first before you pay off that bill, for example. Am I reading that correctly? Absolutely. Yeah, there's some people are just playing financial triage and you have to make those decisions and starting with those consequences as a tool to help you make those triage decisions. But it can go a step further and you can also decide that I'm not going to prioritize paying off this debt as quickly as possible. Putting my extra money toward that because I want to send my kids to private school and that tuition is going to cost me money because I want to take them on a vacation every year because I want to go on a vacation every year, right? You can decide what is a priority in your life instead of taking a set of rules and making your finances kind of this siloed thing that has to follow a certain set of rules and not allowing it to be pliable to the rest of your life. And often the way that we teach personal finance and the kinds of rules that we offer separates them from everything else that's happening in our life and doesn't allow us to find a

balance between those things. You also had some really interesting thoughts on emergency funds and savings. And in fact, you say maybe we shouldn't even use the word emergency. Tell us about that. I use the word rather than emergency fund. I call that nest egg savings that you have a comfort fund or your rainy day savings. I call that a comfort fund because I want to take the the word emergency out of the way that we talk about personal finance, as much as it makes sense for people, because I don't believe that the loss of income necessarily, which is often what we associate with using an emergency fund, has to constitute an emergency in itself, or a change in your finances in general has to constitute an emergency in itself. And I also don't think that

you need to hold on and hoard that money until something feels like a enough of an emergency to use it. You might be in a situation where your job feels toxic or your relationship feels toxic or you're in a neighborhood or an environment that does not support you or affirm your identity in some way. And you're sitting on this mountain of an emergency fund just waiting to be laid off from your job and thinking, well, if I use this, then it won't be available for that imagined eventuality down the line. And I think it's really important to change that language and change our approach to that kind of savings to give ourselves permission to not only be prepared for the unexpected, but also to be prepared for opportunities and to take care of ourselves in

different ways and use it toward comfort that we deserve to have in life. And going back to what you said before, I think the word emergency can also trigger feelings of maybe shame or feeling bad or like you made some big mistake when really it's not helpful to stir up those feelings. Absolutely. Let's talk about investing for a minute. You also say, I mean, we hear all the time people might feel pressure that they should open an investment account. But you say that's also not one size fits all and maybe you shouldn't open one or maybe that doesn't apply to you. Tell us about that. Writing about investing was definitely the hardest chapter in the book to write because I cannot say as a financial educator you don't need to save for your long-term future. Because we live in a culture in the United States that doesn't support people long term, right? We don't have a strong enough safety net that's going to take care of people. And that's largely the change that

needs to be made. But the advice for dealing with that is mostly just a lot of shaming about not saving for retirement. There's a lot of studies and surveys about how much people are not saving for retirement. And the easiest way for an individual to feel in control of that would be to just put that money aside. And so that is good fiscal advice, but we have data that shows that the vast majority of people are not saving for retirement. And so just telling people to save more when they don't have the money to save or they for some reason don't have the ability to save the money they have isn't helping. And so just giving a lot of investment advice is not helping people to prepare for retirement. So I wanted to pull back from that. I also wanted to talk about why you're being told

that you have to put money into a 401k, right? Why people say that you're stupid if you don't do that. To get into kind of how does this product work, where does it come from? What is the history of this? How does it fit into our culture? And to understand, you know, why you're hearing that advice. And what you could maybe do instead. I've talked to a lot of experts and, you know, financial planning experts. They don't have a ton of alternative advice other than a lot of us are probably just going to have to rethink retirement and rethink the way that we work in old age. That's kind of where we are now. Folks on the political side can push more for that kind of change in our public safety net that we need. So as consumers in this world, and you basically alluded to this, we are exposed to so many different kinds of advice. Some of it is not a good

fit for us. Some of it might be. How do you recommend we filter the information that we're exposed to about finances? I liken the relationship that we have to money. to the relationship that we have with food and dieting in our culture. So a lot of people are familiar with the term diet culture, and I talk about budget culture in the book. And so I recommend something that's akin to intuitive eating in the kind of anti-diet movement called conscious spending or intuitive spending, which is that sort of rather than taking a rule of like how much money can I spend on certain things or setting a budget plan for yourself where you're allowed to spend money to think more about what do I need in this moment, in this season, and how can money support

that? You can create a money map for yourself to make sure that you understand where you want to go with your money, what you want to do with your money, but in general, sort of rather than trying to set this stringent kind of path for yourself and how you'll use money, try to do that more intuitively and decide on spending that works for you. That makes so much sense. Spending that works for you. That's a big theme. Dana Miranda,

thank you so much for joining us on Smart Money. Thank you so much for having me. And thank you, Kim. We're about to get to this episode's money question segment, but first, listener, take a moment and think. Just pause and ask yourself where you need some nerdy guidance with your money. Maybe you're trying to figure out how to save more money each month when your expenses keep getting more expensive.

Or you see the holidays creeping closer each day and want tips for how to prepare. Speaking for myself, whatever your money question, we nerds are here to help. Leave us a voicemail or text us on the nerd hotline at 901-7373. That's 901-730 nerd. And a reminder that we love talking with you, our listeners, live on the podcast. Whether we're answering your money questions or helping you figure out your budget with one of our budget rehab episodes, we would love to chat with you live on the show. So one more time, leave us a voicemail or text us on the nerd hotline at 901-730 6373. That's 901-730 nerd.

You can also shoot us an email at podcast atnerballet.com. Moving along swiftly, let's get to this episode's money question segment. That's up next. Stay with us. Are you looking for ways to make your everyday life happier, healthier, more productive, and more creative? I'm Gretchen Rubin, the number one bestselling author of the Happiness Project, bringing you fresh insights and practical solutions in the Happier with Gretchen Rubin podcast. My co-host and Happiness Guinea Pig is my sister, Elizabeth Craft.

That's me, Elizabeth Craft, a TV writer and producer in Hollywood. Join us as we explore ideas and hacks about cultivating happiness and good habits. Check out Happier with Gretchen Rubin from Lemonada Media. We're back and we're answering your money questions to help you make smarter financial decisions. This episode's question comes from a listener. Center's voicemail. And here it goes. Hey, Sean and Elizabeth. This is Margaret. And I have a question around fees with investing. I use a financial planner and I know they charge a specific fee according to how much of my money they're managing. But I also know that individual funds that are

getting managed have their own fees. And I also believe if my financial planner is using a broker such as Schwab, there are probably fees coming on there. So I would love. to hear a session around this topic of fees. What is a high fee? What is a low fee? What happens when they all come together? And at the end of the day, I'm a firm believer of you get what you pay for. So our high fees, if that's the issue, are you getting the equal amount of value out of paying those high fees? Thank you. Love the show. To help us answer Margaret's question on this episode of the podcast, we are joined by James Bashel, Financial Advisor with NerdWallet affiliate nerd wallet wealth partners. Hey James, welcome to smart money. Hey guys. Thanks

having me. Before we get into the conversation, a quick note from our legal team, we need to say nerd wallet wealth partners is the investment advisor and has the ability to discuss investment advice generally subject to the marketing rule under the Advisors Act. This will keep an arm's length distance from the investment related topics for nerd wallet to support its publisher's exemption. Let's hope that people understand what that actually means. carrying on, James. So to start, I'd love if you could outline the various fee structures that advisors use and how they work. I'm thinking here of assets under management, also known as AUM, and then fee-based and fee-only. So can you give us an outline of those? Oh, also I should add

that there's commission-based. So let's talk about these different options. It's so difficult to navigate because some of those are legal terms and some of them are more colloquial terms. So I think if we start top-down, there were two standards within the industry. You've got the fiduciary standard and the suitability standard. And those are important as far as fee only and fee-based go. So fee-only means that the only fee they're going to charge you is the fee that they quote you. That's the only income that the person's going to be earning. And that could be maybe at an hourly rate or perhaps per financial plan. I kind of can go into that a little bit. So the way that those fee-only can look is a percentage of your assets on the management. So you

have $100,000. They charge $1%. That'll be $1,000 a thousand dollars a year. If either a fixed fee, maybe it's, hey, a single planning engagement, it's going to be $3,000, and we give you a plan at the end of that. It's exactly what you see is what you get. There is nothing behind the curtain in many ways. That fiduciary standard is the legal obligation to act in your best interests at all times. So there's no conflict of interest. They have to do what is best for you. The fee-based side is what falls under what they call the suitability standard, and that is more around,

Is this product suitable for the clients, not necessarily the best product? And the reason they might not give you the best product is because the advisor might be getting a commission from a third party for that on top of the fee that you're paying them. So in the case of it can still be a percentage of AUM, right? It can still be 1% of $100,000 plus they might put you in a mutual fund that gets them some kind of commission off the back end. I think a lot of people would hear, oh, an advisor's not recommending the absolute best product for me because they're, getting a commission and have some problems with that. But I wonder from a practical standpoint whether it may actually matter that much to a person. If they're getting the product and the advisor is helping them get it and manage their finances, maybe that's the tradeoff for not getting

the absolute best product for them. But at the same time, I tend to lean more toward fee only in my firm. That's how I have things structured at an hourly per plan basis because I am really wary of any conflict of interest, especially with my work here at NerdWallet. So it gets a little bit thorny. Yeah, 100%. And I think if you go back in history, it's always interesting at a fees level to dig into where and how we got here. The origin of fees was really in the brokerage world where you would get cold cold. You think of Wolf of Wall Street or something like that. Like someone phones you and wants to sell you a stock or something and they make you a client, and they were earning a fee for every stock they sold as a percentage of the amount

you invested. That has morphed through the years into more of an advisory type model. If you think of the Wolf of Wall Street, they definitely weren't acting in the best interests of the people at all times. There was no fiduciary standard at that time. I mean, maybe there was, but they certainly weren't fiduciaries in that case. We've tended towards fiduciary because there was an inherent conflict of interest when there was a sales benefit through one product over another. That conflict of interest, exactly to your point, might not be a problem if the alternative is not getting any advice at all. Yeah. Right.

And in most cases, I mean, the suitability standards. is still strict, right? They're not going to sell a hedge fund to someone who has no risk tolerance. You still aren't allowed to do that, but you might get a situation where they could buy you S&B 500 ETF at three basis points, like 0.03% is what that looks like, or a mutual fund that tracks the S&B 500 at 1% fee. That's totally not in your best interest. They're both going after the same return profile. However, the salesperson or the advisor might be getting a commission by putting you in the more expensive product, that's clearly the conflict of interest you might be dealing with. Now, in your case, it was a really good point you made. Maybe it's still

better than not having any advice? Absolutely. I think that still applies. Well, James, speaking of fee structures, what might be a high fee and what might be a low fee for each of the structures that we've discussed. That's a really good question. I've dug into this extensively because I always want to make sure that, you know, where we are is fair and competitive. And I think we're seeing margin compression across the whole industry, which is inherently good for the consumer.

And the reason for that is a competition, but B, just efficiency. Can you outline what that term means margin conversion? Yeah, so the fees people are charging are getting smaller and smaller over time. and I think it wouldn't have been unusual to see a fee north of 2% of AUM 10, 15 years ago, whereas now you'd almost never see that. So it's very difficult to pin down what people are actually charging. Very few people disclose their fees. All fees are, quote-unquote, negotiable,

which means often on their regulatory filing there'll be a fee, but who knows if people are actually paying that fee. There are some pretty good resources online who have tried to aggregate these. There's one advisory HQ is a source that I've gone to a few times which ranks advisors so they have access to what people are actually charging.

Let's talk in two buckets. So we've got the fixed fee side or the hourly side and then the percentage of AUM side, which is more variable with the amount of assets that we're managing. AUM is assets under management for context. So on the percentage of AUM side, the average fee across all asset levels

I've seen quoted is around 1.1.1. 5%. So what's important about that, James? I think what's important is different asset levels have different complexity. So higher assets are going to be more complex. So at a total, you expect to pay more fees. Like if you have a $10 million account, you've come with a lot more risk and a lot more considerations than someone who's a $100,000 account. However, you would be far stretched to say that a $10 million account is proportionately more complex. Like, it's not a hundred times more complex than a $100,000 count. So what you'll see is at the $100,000 level,

the fee might be 1.2% of assets under management, so $1,200 a year. At the $10 million, you might see it's at 0.5%. So a lower fee is a percentage of the total, but a higher fee in total because it's of the percentage. And that's a bit mind-boggling to get to head around, but the way I try and explain it is there's an increase in complexity with the amount of assets.

However, that complexity increases at a decreasing rate. So it's not linear the relationship between the amount of assets and the amounts of complexity. So when a client is shopping around for an advisor and they're considering these different fee structures, when might they prefer maybe fee-based over AUM or fee-only versus fee-based? What do you think they should be thinking about? The reason you're getting a financial advisor is because you need help. and the fee you want to pay needs to be justified

by the value you get out. How that fee is calculated is less important than the actual fee you are paying. So a lot of people see the AUM model is, well, my fees are going to go up the more my assets go up, that's inherently bad.

It's like, well, not necessarily because your complexity is going up, is the service you're going to receive as a result better, which then justifies the higher fee. I think what's important on the fixed fee level is often the first

fixed fees are actually banded by AUM. So you'll see something like $3,000 under $500,000 in assets, and then $5,000 up to a million. And like if you double back, they're very similar fee levels to the percentage of AUM. So the preference really lies in certainty. And I think a lot of people like to know how much they're going to pay, which is where the fixed fee makes sense. However, it is quite nice not to renegotiate the fees every single time your assets go up, in which case the AUM makes sense. Now, let's talk about fees that an advisor might sneak into a contract that might not be necessary. What should people be looking out for here?

I think we are in a good regulatory world where there are fewer of those now than they used to be. One thing that I see quite a lot is advisors charging an upfront planning fee and then an ongoing fee thereafter on top of the planning fee. and it seems like you might be paying twice for the same thing. So it's really important to ask the question, what are the bounds within which the fees apply, which services the planning, which services the ongoing, and how can you differentiate them,

just to make sure you're not getting charged twice for exactly the same thing. All right. So something our listener didn't ask about but that I think is really important in this conversation is hiring a properly credentialed advisor. The term financial advisor itself is not actually regulated, which I always find a little bit baffling,

and I don't think a lot of folks are truly aware of that. You know, any random social media financial influencer could call themselves a financial advisor. And in fact, many do. But being a certified financial planner, a CFP, or a chartered financial analyst, a CFA, or a certified public accountant, a CPA, which you are, James, those are true marks of knowledge and professionalism. So can you talk about why hiring an advisor with a designation, particularly a CFP for financial planning is important?

And, of course, full disclosure of my personal bias here is that I am a CFB. Yeah, I think that's a really good question. There are so many letters that go out to people's names. I think it is important to step back and look at the regulatory framework. And that is, to be an investment advisor, you do have to pass an exam. It just doesn't have a name. So you have to pass a series 65 exam. No one's got that on their resume.

But it is important that they are credentialized to that extent. the three letters are above and beyond. So this is a differentiating feature. The bar to get in the 65 is much lower than the bar to getting a CFP, CPA, CPA. I think what they show is two things. And I recently wrote the CFP exam, so I've got really good sort of recent knowledge of it. And that is... You passed. Congratulations. Thank you. Yeah. And the CFP is the most specifically geared towards financial planners. So there are, of course, holes in everything. So you could say some are going to be better than others. But as a broad grounding, it is probably the safest place to go from a branding perspective that you know the person has really done

the hard work to understand the nuance and the detail behind their profession. And something else that you alluded to earlier is the fiduciary standard. CFPs have to put their clients' interests ahead of their own. That and the code of ethics that CFPs have to follow, I find to be really compelling from a financial planner and client perspective, you know that this person has your best interest in mind. And sure, there are some shady CFPs out there. That's why they have a regulatory body to catch people who do things that aren't great. But it's just a nice assurance that this person knows what they're talking about and that they are, again, putting your interest out of their own. Yeah, 100%. And that's that alignment of interest. It's so important that

your advisor wants you to succeed. And there's unfortunately, I mean, it's based into pretty much any service you get in life, but it is potential, there is so much potential for them to put their own interest ahead of yours. The CFP holds them to a standard that they can't do that, which is really reassuring. I do have a question for people who don't go for a CFP, and they're typically going to these finance professionals, because as we said, they need help. So how do they know whether, you know, this person has their best interests at heart, especially if they don't know much about finances and what the best financial product is. I think experience speaks volumes.

So where did the person get trained is so important. Did the person study finance is a pretty good place to start. But secondarily, where have they worked? Look at their LinkedIn profile. Look at their website. Trying to understand their experience. Because there are actually a lot of very highly qualified and capable people in the industry who don't have three letters after their name.

And the reason for that is they've been in really good training programs working under really good people. I would also ask for references. If someone is a financial advisor of some sort and they have years of experience like you're saying, James, see if you can talk with their other clients and just get a feel for how they work. That way you can help vet them in a more holistic way. So I want to pivot a bit because so far we've just been talking about human advisors, but robo advisors are a big player in the investment space. and some folks may be even turning to AI chatbots for financial planning and advisory services.

Can you talk about how these more electronic elements fit into planning and maybe what their fees might be compared to human advisors? If you break up the fees that you would get from a financial advisor, there is a planning piece and then there's often an investment piece. The robo advisors really just do that second part. And so there's not the same rigor of getting to what are your goals and how you're going to achieve. them, but they are very well-constructed portfolios that make the process of investing much easier. As a result, if you take a step back, their fees are going to be much lower than a holistic planner's fees. You're getting much less in the service. So I think I said the average fee for financial advisors around 1% of assets. The average fee for a robo-advisors

about 0.25%, so a quarter. Charge GPT is only, or deep-seek, they're only as good as information you give them. and it's not prompting the right questions of you, whereas an advisor is going to be asking the right follow-up questions to get to the answer we're looking for. So the depth of answers is going to be somewhat different and probably more tailored to your specific situation. Margaret says that she's a believer that you get what you pay for

when it comes to fees. Now, I'm taking that to mean that higher fees might mean better returns on an investment, for example, but we know that's not always true. Some folks pay advisors to actively manage their investments, regularly buying and selling stocks. But we've seen that this type of investment management often underperforms passive investment, and it's generally more expensive than passive investing. So, James, what are your thoughts on the idea that you get what you pay for?

The active versus passive debate at the tail end of your question is so important. And I think it goes back to some fairly complex financial principles. The reality for us as consumers is that the efficiency of markets by virtue of there being loads of participants in the markets, think of all the big banks, just think just like visualized New York City, like all those tall buildings, all people who are trying to beat the market. It means that all known information is baked into markets. It means it's really difficult to outperform the market on an individual level. There are two really good studies, one by Morningstar and one by the S&P Global.

group that basically track for the last 25 years the performance of active managed portfolios, which means they're buying and selling individual stocks to try and beat the index versus passive portfolios, which just track the index. And what they've found is over 10 plus years, over 80% of the active managers underperform the market. So the fees that you're paying for those mutual funds tends to be the reason they actually underperform the market. So the conclusion, just buy the market, which is what we get through ETS. So that's the first thing. So you don't necessarily get what you pay for. However, this isn't all about investment returns. And that's where it's really important to differentiate. If no one beats the market, being invested is the

number one most important principle. But the second thing is the psychological benefit. And Vanguard's done some really interesting research in this respect. And they talk about three things that people get from being with a financial advisor. They say, create a peace of mind, which is here. huge. Few in negative and more positive emotions. That's really speaking to financial anxiety, like quietening down that negative emotion. And the third thing is getting time back for what matters. And outsourcing the job to someone whose single job it is to make sure your finances looked after and gives you more time to go and live your life. So paying the fee does make sense to get those pieces back. That makes me think about how so often with managing your finances or life

in general, it's not just about the exact dollars and sense, but what you were getting as like a the emotional benefit of it, to your point. Can you sleep better at night just because you are paying someone to manage your finances for you? For a lot of people, the answer is yes, and it's worth that cost. 100%.

Thank you so much for sharing all this knowledge on fees. James, do you have any final thoughts you want to leave with our listeners about how they should navigate the various fees associated with working with a financial advisor and investing?

I think shopping around is the most important principle. So meet multiple people because the fees might look different on paper, but you're probably getting different things. So find the solution that you're looking for and find the best fee for that solution, and that's where you should go.

Comparison between similar services is what's going to get you to the best end point. Well, James, thanks for coming on and sharing your insights. Yeah, you're welcome. And that's all we have for this episode. Remember, listener, that we are here to answer your money questions. So turn to the nerds and call or text us your questions at 901-730-6373.

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And here's our brief disclaimer. We are not your financial or investment advisors. This nerdy information is provided for general, educational, and entertainment purposes, and it might not apply to your specific circumstances. This episode was produced by Tess Viglin. Hilary Georgie helped with editing. Nick Carysamy mixed our audio and a humongous thank you to NerdWallet's editors for all their help.

And with that said, until next time, turn to the nerds.