On a $1,000,000 portfolio, a 1% fee is $10,000 in year one. Over decades, small percentages compound into real money — and depending on your numbers, a flat fee can cost less, or more. Don’t take anyone’s word for it either way. Run your own numbers.
Think of your money like a snowball rolling downhill. Every year it earns a little, that gets added on, and the next year earns on top of that. That right there — compounding — is the whole game.
Now, a 1% fee shaves a chunk off the snowball every single time it rolls over. Do that for 25 or 30 years and it just doesn't pick up nearly as much snow. The fee itself is bad enough. The growth you never got to keep is the real killer, and it's the part almost nobody shows you.
There's also a quieter issue worth understanding. When an advisor's pay is a percentage of your balance, their incentives and your goals don't always point the same direction. The more you keep parked in the account, the more they're paid — so paying off the mortgage, helping the kids, or spending the money down all quietly work against their revenue. That doesn't make percentage-based advisors bad people; it's simply how the model is built, and it's worth knowing about.
This is why the calculator surprises people. One percent feels tiny in the moment, but it compounds against you the more you save. Seeing your own number is the whole point — so you can decide for yourself what a fair price for advice actually looks like.
Straight talk: at a smaller balance, a flat fee can actually cost more than 1%. The percentage model tends to win when you don't have much, and lose badly once you've built something real. Slide your balance up in the calculator and watch where it flips. We're not going to pretend a flat fee is right for everyone — that's the whole point of running the numbers instead of taking anyone's word for it.
That's the thinking behind Ignite Financial: a flat fee. You pay for the advice and the planning — not a percentage of everything you've spent a lifetime saving. We have to charge for our work, but you shouldn't have to tip your advisor a slice of your life savings on top of it, year after year. If you're curious what your own numbers look like, we'll walk through them with you — no cost, no pressure. And if a flat fee isn't right for you, we'll tell you that too.
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