My Best Advice About Marketing Fee-Only

By Bob Veres

Let me be clear upfront: I sincerely hope that 2026 is the year that Fee-Only planning becomes a talking point in the financial press. If I’m thinking strategically, I see Fee-Only as the tip of a huge wedge into the awareness of the consuming public. You catch their attention by pointing out that some advice-givers embrace conflicts and are paid to make certain (inevitably less attractive) recommendations over other ones. And then you follow up with less catchy issues like the fiduciary standard (loyalty to the client), competency with the technical issues, and “best fit” with the particular needs of the client.

They’re all important, but Fee-Only is a lot easier to explain. That’s why it’s the tip instead of somewhere in the back. (“Fiduciary” has proven to be a bad tip but an excellent part of the wedge.)

A Little History

The last time Fee-Only planning was a routine part of consumer financial reporting was the 1990s and early 2000s, when NAPFA member Ron Roge and others told reporters and magazines that they might be taking on significant liability if they recommended or quoted advisors who sold products. This was in the shadow of the limited partnership debacle, when the nature of the liability was clearly visible, when roughly 90% of commission-compensated advisors had recently been enthusiastically selling “investment opportunities” that ultimately decimated their customers’ retirement savings.

Since then, the Fee-Only community—including NAPFA—has been relatively quiet on the issue. In the later 2000s, we saw a kind of counterargument emerge, which basically said that it’s just not very productive (or nice) for advisors to disparage each other. NAPFA advisors who were quoted in the press were described as “unhelpful bomb throwers.” I still hear that today, and I suspect you do too.

Touting Fee-Only planning comes with some risks. As a magazine editor for an open forum organization, I was repeatedly asked not to profile those “Fee-Only fanatics,” with the pressure on consumer and trade magazine editors being directly correlated to broker-dealer and wirehouse advertising dollars. When an organization like NAPFA goes on the offensive, so too will organizations with pockets deep enough to accommodate a black hole.

The Need for Nuance—And Understanding the Risks

There’s a growing sentiment in the NAPFA community for the organization to be more active and aggressive in promoting Fee-Only planning and a certain impatience with bringing up the rest of the wedge. I think there’s room for nuance here. Why not promote Fee-Only, but then suggest that this be the first (and most obvious) filter for consumers to use when choosing an advisor and discuss some of the others as important secondary filters as they hone their search process?

But remember the risks. I’ve seen with my own eyes the smug look of certainty on the face of a large firm's executive when he pronounces that “it’s time to put those Fee-Only fanatics in their place.” NAPFA and NAPFA advisors will have to develop very sharp elbows when they respond to the inevitable counterattack, and a certain amount of finesse as well. No more bomb throwing. 

What do I mean by that? The Fee-Only campaign would need to identify concrete examples of conflicted recommendations, which would require spending as much money, time, and energy on research as on ad spend. It would need to be opportunistic so that whenever an investment “opportunity” blows up, there’s a ready message about the very tangible dangers of conflicted advice.

By finesse, I mean instead of messaging, “Those brokers are unscrupulous salespeople,” you might simply observe that “people always seem to get better results when the recommendations they receive aren’t bought and paid for by an outside party.” I would refer to everyone who accepts commissions as “brokers” and commissions as “payments for substandard recommendations.” (Who wants to receive a recommendation that a broker wouldn’t otherwise have made unless they were paid to do it?) 

And by sharp elbows, I mean that the Fee-Only community should be prepared to answer the charge that they’re unhelpful bomb-throwers. You would need to have pointed messages at your fingertips. 

Isn’t it easy to see that the investing public would be better served if everybody followed our model and gave up commissions and being told what to sell?

Have you ever, yourself, looked at this or that brokerage firm’s regulatory history on BrokerCheck? I’d be happy to log in with you, and we can go through many pages of issues that have never been a problem at our firm. Can’t you see that that’s where commission compensation leads you?

If I decide to serve my clients with as few conflicts as possible, does that really make me a fanatic? Really?

I sometimes wish that we Fee-Only advisors could siphon as much of peoples’ savings into their own pockets as the brokerage firms do, just so we’d have close to the same lobbying power and ad spend as they do.

Yes, the messaging is easier with Fee-Only than with competency, the fiduciary standard, and the rest of the wedge. But including all the rest of it in the follow-up communications makes the message more plausible. It’s best to start with Fee-Only but I’m not going to tell you that’s the whole story. Here are some other things people need to know to refine their search and get the best advice.

And finally, if the messaging gets the same kind of traction that it has in the past, I would ask the NAPFA community to open its doors and be willing to accommodate more clients—as an act of kindness, if nothing else. Many of the people knocking on your doors will be refugees from a world of exploitation. Find a way to make room for them, or find them a good, welcoming home within the community.

That, after all, would be the point of the messaging in the first place.

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Bob Veres is the publisher of Inside Information and one of the strongest advocates of Fee-Only planning in today’s profession. If you think his columns are full of the stuff that hits the fan, tell him so directly at bob@bobveres.com.

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