Understanding Our Fee Structure
We Offer a Variety of Client Services in Both Fee Only and Fee Based Options
Regardless of fee structure, we always act as a fiduciary on behalf of our clients. The choice of fee structure provides options to our clients.
Increasingly, investors are paying higher costs for fee only advice when a traditional fee based approach may be more cost-effective. Fee only pricing can be a misleading label. Just because a payment is not being made to an advisor from the investment doesn’t mean the underlying investment has zero cost to the investor. A fee only platform has two costs—the fee paid to the advisor plus the underlying investment cost. Sadly, many fee only practitioners don’t fully disclose the underlying cost of the investments.
We believe that investors should be fully informed of all investment costs no matter where they originate from. We detail all of the costs our investors pay in writing.
Bottom Line - Don’t Be Confused by Labels
Our Investment Philosophy Statement
Since its founding in 1984, the investment philosophy of the firm and its affiliates has remained largely the same. We believe that the best investment vehicle to achieve our clients’ financial goals is one that utilizes a cross section of actively managed investments that have long term track records of at least 20 years and predominantly own large companies located around the world that produce the goods, products and services that are consumed by all on a daily basis.
More importantly, we believe that investment performance and how you achieve results over time through consistency and diversification are the single biggest determinants of client success. For more information, visit our philosophy on financial planning. In addition, we believe that carefully monitoring investment expenses and ensuring our client total costs are significantly below the industry averages only helps to bolster investment returns.
Most importantly, our approach has generated the best possible returns over time for our clients. PERIOD. In fact, we have yet to discover any firm that produces results comparable to our results at the fee structure we offer.
Against this background, in January, 2026, we introduced Nelson Advisory Services, Inc. (NAS), a state registered investment advisory firm in Florida. NAS has partnered with Charles Schwab & Co., Inc. as our custodian and brokerage platform, which can hold a range of investment products. The purpose of introducing an advisory firm was to help our clients better consolidate their existing assets under our overall management. It was not to change our investment approach of primarily focusing on actively managed investments. It was not to offer the latest new financial products. What’s worked for 40+ years will be what continues to work in the future!
A key distinction between brokerage services and investment advisory services comes down to the manner in which the client pays us (or any other firm for that matter). Using brokerage services, the compensation paid by the client is detailed in writing in the prospectus of the particular security that must be filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. This ensures that every client pays the same for a similar investment within a particular brokerage firm and even among different brokerage firms.
In striking contrast, no such parameters exist in the investment advisory world. An investment advisory firm is allowed to charge similar clients varying charges and similar clients at different advisory firms will experience different charges. In essence, the investment advisory model is to basically charge a client whatever they think they can get away with charging since there is no governing industry wide standard. We believe this distinction clearly puts the investing public at significant disadvantage when using investment advisory services and ultimately reduces their investment performance over time.
By way of example, some of the limited scenarios where we would recommend the advisory services of NAS to a client are:
- Investments with significant capital gains in a non-qualified account.
- Investments having unique characteristics that require Schwab brokerage services.
- Investments that need proper warehousing under our firm’s management umbrella.
