One percent of two million dollars is twenty thousand a year. You can do that math in your head, which is exactly why the fee is the first thing you look at and the last thing you feel good about.
The trouble is that the number doesn't tell you what you're buying. "Financial advisor" covers a range of jobs (to our dismay) that don't much resemble each other, and most of them are sold at about the same price. One percent for someone who builds and rebalances a portfolio is a different purchase than one percent for someone who also plans for the tax bill before it lands, works the equity comp decisions through with you, keeps your estate plan matched to the life you have now, and keeps the professionals who each know a piece of your situation pointed the same way. Same number, different service level.
So the question isn't whether one percent is worth it. It's what's inside the one percent.
What a Percent Can Mean
Two advisors can quote the same rate and sell genuinely different work.
The narrower version is investment management: an allocation, a rebalance, a review. Done well, that is real work and worth paying for. Plenty of people are meaningfully better off with it than without it, because the hardest part of investing usually isn't optimization. It's knowing where to start and how to maintain the right portfolio for your situation.
The broader version includes all of that and keeps going. It's the version where someone is already tracking the vest that lands in November, the lockup that expires in March, and the fact that your accountant doesn't know you moved states.
Both are legitimate. They cost about the same. The fee schedule doesn't distinguish them, which is where the question goes wrong.
What the Broader Version Is Doing
Knowing the answer before the clock starts. A tender offer lands, or an acquisition closes, or the lockup finally lifts. Now there's a window, usually a few weeks, and inside it you have to decide how much to sell, whether to sell shares outright or exercise first, and which lots to use. Each of those choices carries a different tax outcome. Working it out inside the window means doing arithmetic against a deadline with half the information. Having worked it out beforehand means the window is mostly paperwork.
Finding the tax bill while there's still a decision to make. You exercise ISOs in the spring. The shares land in your account and there's no market to sell them into. The following April, your accountant explains that the spread became a preference item for the alternative minimum tax, and the bill is due on shares you still can't sell. Nothing about that is fixable in April. It was fixable the previous spring, when exercising less, or exercising later, was still on the table.
Carrying the coordination instead of handing it back. Most people in this situation already have an accountant and an attorney, and often an insurance agent. Each is good at their own piece, and none of them can see the others. So the attorney drafts the trust and nobody retitles the accounts to match it. The accountant sets your quarterly estimates off last year's return, not knowing about the exercise you're weighing for November. When you're the only line between them, answers come back as "it depends," because from where they're sitting it genuinely does. Someone holding the whole picture is what turns questions into answers, and takes that job off your desk.
Fixing what stopped being urgent years ago. There's a category of item that never reaches the top of anyone's list: the rollover you didn't finish when you changed jobs, coverage bought against an income you've since outgrown, a beneficiary form still naming someone from a previous decade. None of it is on fire. All of it costs something, quietly, for as long as it sits. It doesn't get handled because nothing ever forces it to.
None of that is portfolio management. None of it is especially hard on its own, either. It's hard because one change resets the rest. A move, a new grant, a liquidity event, and a decision that was right last year isn't anymore. Most of them come with a deadline nobody announces.
If What You Want Is a Portfolio
If what you want is someone to build and manage a portfolio, that's a real product, and there's no reason to pay for scope you won't use. Say so plainly when you're interviewing, and ask what the fee includes beyond the portfolio. A straight answer is useful either way.
The mismatch isn't paying one percent. It's paying for the broader version and receiving the narrower one, or paying for the narrower one while the broader one quietly needs doing.
If What You Want Is the Broader Version
This is the version we run. The broader work is inside the fee, not billed as extras and not left for you to chase down. What We Do walks through it in more detail.
Since this is a post about a number, here's ours rather than the shorthand.
The rate is tiered, so it comes down as the portfolio grows. Two million works out to about $17,000 a year, or 0.85%, against the $20,000 that "1%" implies. You pay on the diversified portfolio we manage: not your unvested grants, not your pre-IPO stock. The full schedule is on the pricing page.
The Question Worth Asking
There isn't a number that settles this. There's a scope, and the scope is what to ask about.
Whoever you're evaluating, us included, the useful questions are the ones that surface it. What happens in the year I have a liquidity event? Who talks to my accountant, and when? What are you doing between reviews? Those should be answerable without hedging.