Archimedes Financial Planning: Costs

Accessing specialised value-adding services
has benefits after costs

The most important factor in financial planning is to make money first, then seek to minimise costs. It’s what you have after costs that matters!

While there is a necessary cost to provide our detailed financial services, our clients understand that costs are not the most important factor when deciding whether to take advice. (Doing it yourself may be cheaper, but what is likelihood it will \produce better results than ours??) 

In summary, we aim to provide above-average quality advice at median industry cost (click here to see independent validation of our investment performance).

We develop strategies that are self-funding, with ongoing costs paid from the investment not your after-tax income. In life, there are no free lunches: so-called “nil entry” or low cost advice will be worth what you pay for it.

We are paid on the basis of

• a fee-for-service for the Strategy Stage
  • start at $330 for low complexity plans (eg budgeting and cash-flow advice, saving for goal such as home deposit)
  • typically in range $440 - $1,100 for medium complexity plans
  • higher cost for very complex situations involving millions of dollars in a variety of investment structures (direct shares / managed funds / commercial and residential property held in a variety of legal entities such as family trusts, companies, self-managed super, personal names)
• if a financial plan requires only personal insurances, usually there are no additional charges other than the above fee-for-service (the insurance premium includes commission, which is disclosed to clients)
• a percentage of any initial investment amount may be charged, depending on complexity of Strategy Stage modelling. If so, this typically is in range 0% to 2.5% depending on the complexity of the plan and the fee paid for the Strategy Stage - the higher the Strategy Stage fee, the lower the percentage of initial amount. The initial fee is capped for investment amounts larger than $500,000
• an ongoing portfolio management fee is paid from the portfolio earnings, not your employment income. It is required to cover the cost of accessing independent research and time to optimise your portfolio (tpically 3, 6 or 12 monthly):
  • ongoing fee is charged as a percentage of invested amount, which aligns completely the interests of client and adviser
  • total ongoing fee depends on amount invested, typically in range 1% pa to aound 2% pa. It  covers cost of both Archimedes Financial Planning and the wholesale platform).

These costs should be compared with the expected reward from detailed financial planning. Our aim is to more than recoup these costs after implementing our strategies for the first year.

Be aware that any financial plan with lower costs must have cut corners somewhere if it provides the detail and client focus of Archimedes Financial Planning. To the lay person, it is often difficult to ascertain what they are losing by accepting lower prices.

A final comment: given the value-adding and client-centric services we provide, we believe our costs are very competitive. People who are not clients will naturally have reservations about accepting this statement. We suggest they review our Testimonials.