Randy Cass is the CEO and founder of Nest Wealth, a Canadian robo-advisor that uses a monthly subscription model for its fee, as opposed to charging a percentage of assets.
With their subscription model, clients pay between $20/month and $80/month depending on their level of assets being managed. On the high end, that’s $960 per year (plus tax), even if you have $10 million invested with them. There are two other layers of cost: the cost of the investment products (which are passively managed ETFs with fairly low management expense ratios), and commissions to execute trades (which are capped at $100 per year). In the end, their model makes them a relatively expensive robo-advisor for small portfolios but becomes more and more attractive, on a pure cost basis, as portfolios get larger.
Randy and I talk about the genesis of Nest Wealth, and then get into a deeper conversation about cost and value, specifically along the dimension of financial advisors who only provide investment advice versus those who provide comprehensive financial planning, and tough love.
I should point out that Randy indicated several times that the acoustics in his office were horrible – and he was right.
The episode is now available on iTunes (You have to click through to “view in iTunes”). You can also just use the embedded player or MP3 download down below to listen to it right away (you must be on this website to see it).
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As always great show and advise!
Great Podcast – Randy Cass did a great job of explaining on-line advisers benefits vs the high cost of dubious financial advice that comes with mutual funds. While I went with the DYI ETF model Nest Wealth has a great value proposition. I may go with them in the future.