Bellevue Low Cost Investment Advisor

Our Fees Help You Retain More of Your Wealth

Our investment in technology and emphasis on index funds allows us to offer highly personalized investment advice at comparatively low cost.

Rain Dog’s Low Cost Fee Structure

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 $2.5 million in AUM, this works out to an annual fee of 0.55%, and at $5 million it is 0.40%. 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. 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 $1,500,000 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

Calculate Your Fees

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.

How Can Our Fees Be So Low?

Our investment recommendations center on index funds, which are comparatively low effort to manage. Some firms justify higher fees by actively trading individual stocks and other securities. In practice, nearly all actively managed funds underperform their benchmarks over time, and we believe that most investors will pay twice by using a firm that actively manages their portfolio—once in higher advisor fees and once in lower returns. Read more about our investment strategy.

Rain Dog does not take custody of your investments. Our 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.

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 index-based investment philosophy. You benefit both from our lower fees and from our ability to tailor an investment solution specifically to you.

Rain Dog concentrates on investment management and related services. Other advisors that cater to high net worth investors offer “family offices” that will pay your bills, update your wills, book your travel plans, and provide many other amenities.

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 an investment advisor, using Rain Dog will mean that you won’t be paying for services you don’t need.

If you occasionally need other support, we have a network of highly recommended attorneys, estate planners, CPAs, and other professionals that we will be happy to refer you to. If you do need full family-office support, we’ll be happy to refer you to highly recommended professionals in that area too.