Our goals are aligned with yours

At Retirement Income Solutions, you’ll work with a fee-only financial advisor.

That means that we don’t make money by selling our clients certain investment products. Our compensation comes entirely from our advisory services, not from commissions or referral fees. We don’t get paid by anyone but our clients.

As a fee-only investment adviser, we follow the fiduciary standard, which means that in our investment recommendations and decisions, we must put the interests of our clients above our own. Our management fees are transparent and appear on every quarterly performance report we send to clients.

We have a deep bench of financial advisors, Certified Financial Planner™ Professionals (CFP), and a Chartered Financial Analyst® (CFA Charterholder) in Ann Arbor. Our investment decisions are based on only one consideration: what will best help you try to achieve your financial goals.

Our fee structure

Minimum account size of $750,000.

Our clients pay a quarterly fee based on their assets under management (AUM). This fee covers our active management of your investment portfolio across different accounts and toward different goals. We don’t charge for advice and we don’t limit your access to your financial advisor. You can ask as many questions as you’d like and we’ll do our best to answer all of them.

Our per annum investment advisory fees are:

  • 1.0%

    up to $1,000,000 AUM (with a minimum account size of $750,000)

  • 0.8%

    For the next $1,000,000

  • 0.6%

    On AUM above $2,000,000

Because our fees are percentages, based solely on the value of your assets, our fees decrease if the value of your assets decreases. Conversely, they increase if the value of your assets increases. That means that as your fee-only financial planner, our incentives are entirely aligned with yours.

Fee-based plans and projects

As needed, we can prepare customized retirement plans for each of our clients depending on their goals and circumstances and charge a one-time fixed fee starting at $1500, depending on the complexity of the plan.

Even though hours of analysis, preparation, and explanation go into each plan, we keep our retirement plans far below the industry standard of $3,000-5,000 because we believe that excellent financial advice should be accessible to all. While our plans come with no obligation to continue working with a RIS financial advisor, over 90% of our retirement plan clients have become ongoing advisory clients.

Making fees as easy as possible to pay

As fee-only financial advisors in Michigan with years of experience working with our great state’s colleges and universities, in many cases we have the option to deduct our investment advisory fees directly from our clients’ TIAA and Fidelity accounts for clients employed by the University of Michigan, Eastern Michigan University, Wayne State University, Michigan State University, Oakland University and other institutions.

This allows you to pay our fees with pre-tax dollars, you pay us nothing out of pocket.

Interested in working with RIS for wealth management, financial planning, or retirement planning? Schedule a no-obligation consultation.