Our Compensation

One of the major differences between Derse Morgen and other financial advisors is the way that we are compensated for our services. While many other financial advisors receive commissions from financial companies for selling their products, we believe there is a significant conflict of interest if an advisor stands to gain more financially by recommending one product over another. We have designed our compensation structure to eliminate this conflict of interest and align our financial success with the financial success of our clients. This means you can be confident that the advice you receive is truly in your best interest.

We are compensated in two distinct ways for two distinct and separate services, and you can choose whichever of these methods is right for you.

Advisory Services Compensation (Flat Fee)
Some of our clients wish to engage our firm to provide comprehensive financial planning and analysis services only and prefer to implement our findings and recommendations on their own, including managing their own investments. In this situation, we would quote a one-time fee for our services, based on the time and complexity necessary to address the client’s needs and goals. This fee is paid directly by the client at the completion of the planning process. We would then provide the client with a written summary of our findings and recommendations, which they could use to implement their financial plan.

Wealth and Investment Management Compensation (Percentage)
Most of our clients choose to engage our firm to provide not only comprehensive financial planning services, but also to have our firm assist them in implementing the findings and recommendations from the planning process. This would include on-going investment management and monitoring of their wealth and investment plan. In this situation, we still provide the client with a quoted one-time fee for service amount, as described above, however this fee is typically offset by future asset management fees that our firm may receive as part of managing your investments. This fee is expressed as an annualized percentage of assets and is applied to only the investment accounts we directly manage. 

At Derse Morgen Financial Advisor we believe that our relationship with you should be a “win-win”, so much so that we try to identify the specific value we can provide compared to the cost of our services. Even so, our fees are generally less than the majority of fee-based and fee-only financial advisors. (See Vanguard Study: Value of a financial advisor)