Fees

We believe in transparency. You should know up front what the costs of working with us will be.

  • We charge on an hourly basis.
  • We believe this is the most fair for you, other clients and for us.
  • If you have a less complex situation, you’re not subsidizing those with more complex situations.
  • If you have a more complex situation, you just pay for what you need.
  • The professional gets paid for time spent helping you.

Typical Cost

Our billable rate is $250 per hour.

The total costs can vary widely from one client engagement to another depending on topics addressed and complexity of the situation.

Regardless, we always provide an estimate of the cost before we agree to work together and sign an agreement.

No Assets Under Management Fee

We don’t believe you should be charged based on the amount of assets you have.

  • We don’t charge based on how many properties you own or how many doors you have.
  • We don’t charge based on how much equity you have.
  • We don’t charge based on how much you have invested in something other than real estate.
  • We never insist that you keep your assets with us (or an institution we recommend or work with). You always keep your assets with whomever you prefer.

Typical Engagement

A typical engagement I might help clients—who are using real estate investments for retirement—is to answer one or more of the following questions:

  • Do I have enough to retire now? When will I have enough to retire?
  • Should I buy more properties or wait?
  • Should I sell properties or wait?
  • Should I refinance properties or wait?
  • Should I refinance money out of properties or wait?
  • Should I payoff my owner-occupant property or wait?
  • Should I payoff my rental properties or wait?
  • Which mortgage/debt payoff strategy will be best for me?
  • How might I optimize rental property cash flow?
  • How risky is one real estate investing plan versus another plan?
  • Is this a good deal or one I should consider adding to my portfolio? Deal analysis and portfolio analysis assistance.

Answering questions like these often means entering your properties, accounts, income/expenses and plans into our planning software and then running comparisons of doing one strategy to your baseline strategy (for example… comparing paying off properties with cash flow to not paying off properties).

Entering your information and answering a couple of the above questions typically takes in the range of 5-10 hours.

Once your information is entered, it is easier and faster to answer additional questions in the future as we only need to update and rerun scenarios.

Typical variability in the time required may be caused by:

  • How well organized you are with the information we need to do the modeling
  • Complexity of your situation (properties, accounts, income/expenses) we need to enter/model in the software
  • Number of different modeling questions you might have

How Our Fees Compare

I believe you should shop around when considering working with any professional (real estate, mortgage, medical, financial, etc).

When shopping around for a financial advisor that focuses on real estate investments, you will find that we are not the least expensive nor the most expensive.

The median (middle most) of hourly rates charged by financial advisors according to the study done in 2020 by Michael Kitces is $250 per hour.

Specialists in the financial industry (as well as many other industries) tend to charge higher hourly fees for their specialty. We have a rare specialization among advisors for real estate investments, but we still charge right around the median.

Furthermore, since the study in 2020, we’ve seen significant inflation. We have not raised our rates (yet) from this up-tick in inflation.

One way we keep rates down is we charge up-front in advance of services. This allows us to save you money by not having to follow up about collecting payment.

What’s Billable and What’s Not

We bill for the time spent on activities for you:

  • Gathering up information and entering your properties, accounts, income/expenses into the software to do the modeling
  • Modeling and performing analysis of the model and writing up/sharing the results
  • Researching topics specific to your needs (if there is something unusual about your situation that requires research)
  • Communication via phone, emails or video conferences with you about financial matters

What we don’t bill for:

  • Initial consultation to discussion a potential engagement
  • Writing/updating the modeling software and related tools as we deem necessary
  • Compliance and continuing professional education requirements
  • Administrative activities including scheduling calls, meetings, preparing engagement agreement

Book Free Consultation

If you’re wondering if we might be able to help you with your situation, book a free, initial consultation to discuss a potential engagement.