Recently there have been several articles in the press about advisory fees and the Department of Labor’s new fiduciary rule that was expected to go into effect in April of  2017. The rule would require financial advisers management retirement accounts to act as a fiduciary, which means putting the client’s best interest ahead of the adviser’s economic interests. The intended law was under review due to the Trump administration’s plans to overhaul financial regulation. 

Fiduciary Rule:

Kingsbridge Wealth  Management is a Registered Investment Advisor (RIA) and is obligated to act as a fiduciary to our clients. Our fee structure is designed to minimize conflicts of interest between us and our clients. Kingsbridge charges an advisory fee, based on assets under management. We do not charge different fees for different asset classes or investments, if we did this it would create an economic incentive to allocate capital to the asset class that pays us the highest fee. This is an obvious conflict that we mitigate by charging the same fee for all the asset classes and investments.

Incentives:

As a wealth owner, it is important to understand who you are dealing with, and if they are acting as an Investment Advisor, a Broker or both? You also need to understand how they are paid. Do you pay them, or does the product they sell you pay them? Although there may be many financial solutions that can be “suitable” to solve your concerns, we believe that advice should be separate from products. It would be very hard to give unbiased advice if two financial products paid the adviser very different amounts.

A Registered Investment Adviser is required to minimize conflicts of interest, a broker is only required to disclose the conflicts of interest in the fine print.