Apparently, I stuck a nerve among flat-fee charging advisors with my March 26 blog for ThinkAdvisor, "Why AUM Fees Still Make (Im)Perfect Sense." The responses included a Twitter conversation started by financial planner Carolyn McClanahan, and a ThinkAdvisor guest blog by James Osborne of Bason Asset Management, titled "No, Asset-Based Fees Don't Make Any Sense."
First, let me say that I have the greatest respect for flat fee-ers: The folks in the Garrett Planning Network and others who have made the choice to earn less money and create less value in their practices in order to follow their consciences and serve the middle market and/or reduce conflicts with their clients. My hat's off to them.
In fact, the flat-fee folks embody the reason I started writing about and for independent advisors 30 years ago: back then virtually all of them could have made more money as brokers or insurance agents but chose to go independent to better serve their clients. I've always had great respect for that approach—and still do: Today's independent advisors who charge AUM fees invariably charge a fraction of the 160bps to 250 bps that many breakaway brokers seem to feel is appropriate. With that said, I have a hard time getting behind the current "flat-fees for everyone" movement for two reasons:
1) rather than a "new" idea, it's an old idea with a history of very limited appeal, for good reasons; and
2) the current tactic by flat-fee advocates to vilify AUM fees.
Here are two examples of the current trend to denigrate fees on AUM. Last week, I wrote about an advisor I talked with who referred to AUM fees as "commissions." As if. And the above referenced title of Mr. Osborne's blog: "No, Asset-Based Fees Make No Sense." No sense? Really? I respectfully suggest that this kind of over-the-top hyperbole (is that redundant?) only serves to make the flat fee-ers look like true believers, while doing nothing to further a reasonable discussion of the relative merits of these two methods of advisor compensation.
As I acknowledged in my earlier blog, Osborne and others are right to say that flat fees offer many of the same advantages as AUM fees: a fiduciary duty, economic independence and recurring revenue. But as far as putting the advisor on the client's side of the table, I'm not so sure. For one thing, flat-fee advisors make the same money whether their clients' portfolios go up—or down. AUM fees, obviously, reward advisors when client portfolios go up, and penalize them when portfolios go down. That kind of identity of interest seems better.
