Transparent. Efficient. Fiduciary Advisor in Bellevue

Our Fees Help You Retain More of Your Wealth

We apply the same disciplined design to our fees that we do to investment portfolios, which is why our fee structure is intentionally simple, transparent, and efficient.

Rain Dog’s Efficient Fee Structure

We’ve engineered our business the same way we engineer financial systems. Our clients don’t pay for commissions, product markups, or institutional inefficiencies. They pay for disciplined financial design and the peace of mind that comes from knowing they have a steadfast financial partner.

The Details. We charge a quarterly investment management fee of $1,875 plus 0.0625% (6.25 basis points) of the investments we manage for you (known as assets under management, or AUM).

At $1 million in assets under management (AUM), this works out to an annual fee of 1.0%, which is near-universal among investment advisors. At higher investment levels, the fee scales down quickly. At $5 million in AUM, this works out to an annual fee of 0.40%, and at $10 million it is 0.33%. Some robo advisors charge more than that.  Check out our fee calculator to see how this applies to you.

Common fees. We do not charge any other fees including commissions, onboarding fees, transaction fees, or fund management fees. The funds and ETFs we recommend will normally have total expense ratios of about 0.10%, which is in addition to our fees.

Less common fees. Some model portfolios, which we do not usually recommend but which some clients might request, have additional fees of 0.10%-0.40%, which is in addition to our fees. Our custodial platform assesses fees for certain transactions including wire transfers and returned checks, which we pass through to the client.

See why we believe this fee is worth paying.

Minimum asset requirement. We do not have a minimum asset requirement, per se. Our fee structure is usually not a good value for investors with less than about $750,000 in investment assets, and it’s an average value for investors with about $1,000,000 in investment assets. It becomes a very good value for investors with $2,000,000 in investment assets or more.

If you are not quite at a level where this fee structure makes sense, please do not hesitate to schedule an appointment anyway. I will be happy to talk with you about steps you can take to get to this level of investment assets. There’s no charge, and the coffee will be on me. 
     — Steve McConnell

Bellevue Low Cost Investment Advisor

Calculate Your Fees

Our goal is simple: to make every part of your financial relationship — from investment design to fees — something you can trust.

Enter the amount of your total investment assets to calculate your fees with Rain Dog.  Investment assets include stocks, bonds, mutual funds, and ETFs held in taxable accounts, IRAs, and solo 401Ks. It typically does not include real estate or 401(k) or 403(b) plans that are managed by your employer.

Low cost investment advisor

How We Keep Costs Low—By Design

Our lower fees come from the same mindset that shapes our investment approach: engineering out complexity that doesn’t serve the client.

Rain Dog Financial is built as a fee-only fiduciary, meaning we don’t accept commissions, kickbacks, or product incentives.

That simplicity isn’t about cutting corners; it’s about focusing resources on analysis, planning, and ongoing partnership—not overhead. This design allows us to deliver well-designed portfolios and disciplined oversight without the gimmicks that inflate fees. Read more about our investment strategy that supports Human Engineering for Financial Confidence.

Most advisors use commercial financial planning software to create recommendations for you, and they are limited by the capabilities of the software they use. We developed our own proprietary software to provide mathematically rigorous support for custom investment decisions that are specifically tailored to our Human Engineering investment philosophy. You benefit both from our lower fees and from our ability to tailor an investment solution specifically to you.

In addition, our custodial partner, Altruist, provides a state-of-the-art digital platform that holds all client assets and provides you with 24/7/365 access. The Altruist platform has major investment from Vanguard and has been designed from the ground up to minimize fees.

Rain Dog concentrates on rigorously designed investment management and related services. Other advisors that cater to high net worth investors offer “family offices” that will pay your bills, book your travel plans, invite you to special events, and provide many other amenities that are peripheral to your finances.

If you need services that go beyond advising your investments, and you want to pay for them, a family office could be a good solution for you. If you are looking mainly for a financial advisor, using Rain Dog will mean that you won’t be paying for services you don’t need.

Our investment recommendations center on index funds because they are efficient and transparent—the perfect foundation for sound financial design. But indexing alone isn’t enough. We integrate indexes into a broader architecture that considers your goals, risk tolerance, tax position, and behavioral tendencies. This approach lets us capture market performance efficiently while managing the parts that matter most to long-term success.