I keep watching the same argument happen in two rooms that never talk to each other.
In one, advisors explain that their fee — whatever it is — buys a comprehensive financial solution. In the other, people on Reddit explain that paying anything at all for a financial service is a scam.
I’ve spent fifteen years in institutional finance and I don’t fully agree with either room.
What the low-fee room gets right
Fees compound, and they compound against you. $250,000 growing at 6% before fees for 25 years ends at roughly $1.02 million at a 0.2% fee. At 2.1% — about what advisor-sold mutual funds cost — it ends near $651,000.
Same money, same market, $370,000 apart.
And the “we’ll beat the market” pitch doesn’t survive the data. S&P’s latest SPIVA Canada scorecard found 98.8% of Canadian equity funds trailed their benchmark over ten years.
What the low-fee room gets wrong
A cheap portfolio only helps if you use it.
Research from Montréal’s CIRANO centre found households with an advisor for 15+ years held substantially more assets than similar households without one — and attributed most of that to two unglamorous things: saving more, and not selling when markets fall.
I hold that loosely. The study was industry-funded, and people who hire advisors may just be natural savers. The famous “behaviour gap” figure was challenged in the Financial Analysts Journal this year too. But the direction is hard to dismiss. Someone paying 0.05% who never contributes, or sells in a panic, can still end up working a very long time.
Where I land
If you’re engaged — a simple 60/40 portfolio, monthly contributions, rebalancing, shopping your own mortgage — the math favours low fees, and it isn’t close.
If you’d rather be hands-off, 0.7% to 1.5% for a competent investment manager (a registered portfolio manager, not a dealer selling products) isn’t bad. They sometimes beat the market. Usually not. What you’re buying is discipline, a person to call, and the confidence it’s handled.
2% is where I get sceptical. At that price you’d want exceptional work across investing, tax, retirement income, estate and insurance at once. I’ve never seen a firm do all of it well.
So the useful question isn’t “are fees bad?” It’s “what am I getting for mine?”
That’s my take, not a rule.
The full version, with the fee ranges by product type and every source: https://www.yougotthiswealth.com/blog/are-financial-advisor-fees-worth-it-canada/?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=brief_2026_09_30&utm_content=canonical
Sources: S&P Dow Jones Indices, SPIVA Canada Year-End 2025; CIRANO (2016, 2020); Vanguard Canada, Advisor’s Alpha; Fulkerson et al., Financial Analysts Journal, 2026; Morningstar Canada 2025 Fund Fee Study.
If you want to see your own all-in fee across every account — and what it compounds to — that’s the thing I’ve been building: https://app.yougotthiswealth.com/auth?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=brief_2026_09_30&utm_content=soft_cta