The Big Picture Retirement Show does not provide specific tax, legal, or financial advice.

Listeners are encouraged to seek out their own advisors in these areas.

Hello, Big Picture Retirement listeners. I am the engineer of this podcast, Steve Stewart,

and Devin and John are still out for holiday. You're taking off vacation for New Year's Eve. And, of course, if you're listening to this on the day of release, it is New Year's Eve, 2018. We're really glad you're here. We're going to bring back another one of the best of 2018 for you. This is how much are you paying for investments? How do you figure out how much money you're spending on your investments? That's what

Devin and John talk about, the types of fees you might be paying, and how you figure out what they

truly are. Here you go. John, how do you know how much you're paying your financial advisor?

That's a good question. So you're a bit of a consumer here, right?

Sure.

I'm on the consumer side.

So I'll ask you, then.

You get your statement.

Is it listed there?

I've got personal financial investments, as well as a company 401K that I offer to my employees.

If I get my statement in the mail and it shows what the investments have done or not done or any of that sort of stuff, there's nothing on there that says, by the way, you paid broker X number of dollars.

Yeah, well, sometimes it can be a little confusing. I'll give you that. When you're looking at your statement, you're trying to figure out what you're paying, there are sometimes fees that are listed, but there's always some fees that are not listed. So today, I want to take a dive into this and let's figure out, are you paying your financial advisor too much?

Yeah, probably a good idea. Let's jump in and look at the two ways that financial advisors

are paid. I'm going to cover the first one real quick. Okay. Because I'm going to make the assumption

that there's not many people left out here like this. And if they are, they need to make a change

quick. So there's really three ways that you can get investment advice, okay, or that you can get

yourself some investments. So you can go to an old school broker,

right, and you can pay a commission. Now, sometimes these brokers also call themselves

financial planners. Sometimes they'll have a fancy CFP designation. Sometimes they'll have all of

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