Build a Financial Advisor Fee Report Card Tool

1. 1

   Stay education, not advice, and mean it

   Recommending whether to fire an advisor or how to invest crosses into regulated investment advice under the Investment Advisers Act and state rules. The product analyzes costs, benchmarks services, and generates questions; it never recommends investments or specific advisors. Have a securities attorney review your output language and disclaimers before launch, and revisit whenever you add features.

2. 2

   Parse the documents people actually have

   Brokerage statements, advisory fee disclosures, and fund fact sheets, uploaded as PDFs. Extract the advisory fee, underlying fund expense ratios, and product costs like annuity riders where visible, and be explicit about what the documents do not reveal (commissions and revenue sharing are often invisible; teach users to ask). Handle these documents with bank-grade security and delete-by-default retention.

3. 3

   Translate percentages into lifetime dollars

   The core output: your all-in cost is this many dollars per year, and at this balance and horizon, roughly this amount over twenty years, shown with transparent assumptions the user can adjust. Percentages anesthetize; dollar figures over decades wake people up. Pair with benchmarks: what full-service planning typically includes at this fee level, so cost is judged against service, not in a vacuum.

4. 4

   Build the red-flag and question engine

   Flag patterns worth a conversation: layered fees (advisory fee on top of expensive proprietary funds), costly products where cheap equivalents exist, and fee levels far above typical for the service tier described. Every flag generates a respectful question to ask the advisor, because the deliverable is a better conversation, and good advisors answer good questions happily.

5. 5

   Ship the heir edition as its own product

   The inheritance moment deserves its own flow: understanding what accounts exist, what the inherited advisor relationship costs, service benchmarks, and scripts for the awkward loyalty conversation. Estate attorneys, probate professionals, and financial therapists are natural referral channels for exactly this user on exactly this week.

6. 6

   Monetize reports, keep independence provable

   One-time report pricing with an annual re-check subscription. Take no referral fees from advisors, ever; independence is the entire brand, and one sponsored recommendation destroys it. Fee-only fiduciary communities will amplify a genuinely neutral tool because it validates their own pitch.

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