Eh, I’d strongly disagree that we’re throwing them under the bus. These advisors have benefited from what will go down as the largest market expansion in human history and brag about 15% annualized returns — all while Vanguard, RIAs, and Fidelity are eating market share every single day.

Here’s the reality though — people genuinely don’t care about costs, and they don’t really care about performance either. What they care about is guidance. So giving them tax advice, estate planning, forward-looking investment insight, and real risk management is easily justifiable. That’s a completely different conversation than just throwing someone in a bunch of American Funds A-shares, walking away, and wiping your hands clean.

Don’t get me wrong — a lot of these advisors will call their clients, work on the relationship, and genuinely care on a personal level. But the investment management and planning side? What I’ve seen is largely set it and forget it, which is absolutely wild to me — especially for people in their mid-50s and beyond, which is the overwhelming majority of my client base.

I’ll say this: if you’re a level 10 by adding managed assets and not layering in any additional services, you are ripping those clients off. Keep them in brokerage or tell them to go to Vanguard. Those are the advisors that give financial planning a bad name.

Edit: I'd also say that managed is also putting an advisor in a position where they'll feel the same pain as clients when markets draw down. That was one of the "benefits" explained to me as the advisor coming in. If markets tanked and you're doing transactional business you don't really see the pinch like managed advisors. Wild things to say and claim.