Clear Money Guide
What this guide covers
A quick view of the questions and evidence developed below.
Guides › Is an Advisor Worth It
Updated August 21, 2026. Quick answer: the price gap is real and so is the scope gap, and both are documented. From the Vanguard Personal Advisor Select brochure that Vanguard Advisers, Inc. files with the SEC (Form ADV Part 2A, dated March 30, 2026), the tiered advisory fee is 0.30% on assets below $5 million, then 0.20% between $5 million and $10 million, 0.10% between $10 million and $25 million and 0.05% above that; Vanguard’s own worked example is “0.30% on the first $5 million = $15,000.” Vanguard Personal Advisor Select “is made available to Personal Investor Clients and prospects with a minimum of $500,000.” Against that, our benchmark of published adviser fee schedules puts the independent weighted median at 0.88% to 1.00% at $1 million ($8,750 to $10,000 a year). On $1 million the difference is roughly $3,000 to $7,000 a year. This page sticks to published pricing and published scope on both sides.
What Vanguard publishes about scope
Directly from Vanguard Advisers, Inc.’s own Form CRS, filed the same day. The programs are described as robo discretionary, hybrid discretionary and hybrid non-discretionary, and “all options will require your accounts to be with Vanguard.” On investment universe: “Our lead investment recommendations will generally only include Vanguard exchange traded funds and mutual funds, and will generally not include purchases of individual securities or bonds, CDs, options, derivatives, annuities, third-party mutual funds, closed-end funds, partnerships, or other non-Vanguard securities.” On the fee’s boundaries: mutual funds carry “built-in fees known as ‘expense ratios’” that are separate, so “your combined fees for advice and investments will vary”; fees are “calculated on a rolling 90-day period based on your average daily balance”; and no advisory fee is charged on money market funds or other cash equivalents, except recommended allocations to cash equivalents in the discretionary offer. On standard of conduct: “When we act as your investment advisor, we are required by law to act in your best interest and put your interests ahead of ours.” The disclosed conflict, in their words: “Our lead advice will be to invest in Vanguard funds. You will pay the funds’ expense ratios.”
Which Vanguard advice service your balance actually buys
The 0.30% above is one rung of a ladder, not Vanguard’s single price for advice. Vanguard Advisers, Inc. files a separate brochure with the SEC for each programme, and the balance you bring decides which one you may enrol in at all. Every figure in this table is from those brochures, read 21 August 2026.
| Programme | Minimum to enrol | Published advisory fee |
|---|---|---|
| Vanguard Digital Advisor | $100 in each eligible Vanguard Brokerage Account | 0.20% gross for the all-index options (0.25% for the active/index mix); net about 0.15%–0.16% |
| Vanguard Personal Advisor | an aggregate $50,000 | 0.35% gross for the all-index options (0.40% for the active/index mix); net about 0.30%–0.31% |
| Vanguard Personal Advisor Select | $500,000 | 0.30% on assets below $5 million, stepping down to 0.20%, 0.10% and 0.05% above that |
| Serviced by Vanguard National Trust Company | $5 million and above, in most cases | not published in the brochures above — see below |
Minimums and rates: Vanguard Digital Advisor and Vanguard Personal Advisor brochure (Form ADV Part 2A, filed 13 July 2026) and Vanguard Personal Advisor Select brochure (Form ADV Part 2A, filed 30 March 2026), both obtained from the SEC’s adviser database on 21 August 2026.
If you are under $500,000, the 0.30% headline is not your rate. Personal Advisor Select “is made available to Personal Investor Clients and prospects with a minimum of $500,000 of investable cash or securities in the Portfolio.” Below that the programme available to you is Vanguard Personal Advisor, whose published gross advisory fee is 0.35% for its all-index options. Vanguard credits back revenue it earns on your holdings to reach a net fee, which it expects to be “approximately … 0.30%–0.31%” for Personal Advisor. So the number lands near 0.30% again — but by a different route, and Vanguard describes it as an expectation that “will vary based on the specific holdings and investment settings in each Enrolled Account,” not as a posted rate.
One charge the headline rate leaves out. Since 1 January 2024 a $75 quarterly Advice Platform Fee “will be assessed on enrolled Vanguard Personal Advisor Select Portfolios with assets less than $450,000.” The Select minimum is $500,000, so this is the charge that arrives if a Portfolio drifts below $450,000 after enrolling — $300 a year, which on a $400,000 balance is a further 0.075% on top of the advisory fee.
At $5 million the service changes hands. The Select brochure states that “in most cases, Portfolios of $5 million and above will be serviced by Vanguard National Trust Company (‘VNTC’), an affiliate of VAI that offers its own version of ongoing advised services to its client base.” VNTC is described in the same brochure as “a federally chartered, limited-purpose trust company regulated by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency,” and its advisory services “use the Vanguard Personal Advisor brand but are provided separately from VAI’s Personal Advisor Select.” A fourth programme, Vanguard Personal Advisor Wealth Management, is named in that brochure’s eligibility rules but has no brochure of its own among the six Vanguard Advisers files, and no Vanguard trust-company entity appears among the twenty-two Vanguard-named firms in the SEC’s adviser database. So if you are at or above $5 million, the schedule you will actually be charged is not published where the three rungs above it are — ask for it in writing before you enrol, and compare it with the independent quote the same way.
Compare the all-in dollar cost, then ask what the difference buys.
The gap only makes sense if the extra work exists. The matching service below introduces you to independent advisers who pay to meet you — ask each one that question directly.
Before you start, what actually happens. The form is run by Kapitalwise, our advisor-matching partner. Kapitalwise sends your details to advisers who pay for the introduction, so expect calls and texts. Clear Money Guide is paid when you submit the form, whether or not you ever hire anyone. This is free to you and there is no obligation to hire anyone.
The Kapitalwise form opens here — you stay on this page.
What happens when you press the button
It asks about nine questions — age, investable assets, location — then your name, email and phone number, and verifies the phone by text. Nothing loads and nothing reaches Kapitalwise until you press the button.
The comparison, as a scope table
Where your assets live. Vanguard requires the advised assets to be in accounts held with its affiliates. An independent adviser generally custodies wherever the adviser has a relationship and can usually accommodate outside holdings. What can be held. Vanguard’s published constraint is the one above — largely Vanguard funds and ETFs. An independent adviser has an open universe, which matters most if you hold a legacy low-basis position, a concentrated stock, an annuity or anything else you cannot simply sell. Coordination. A programme priced at 0.30% is priced for scale; coordination with your own attorney and accountant on estate structure, multi-year tax projection, charitable strategy or business succession is the kind of work an independent adviser charging near 1% ought to be delivering. Whether you are getting it is the question worth asking, because the gap only makes sense if the extra work exists — advisor versus wealth manager is the same test in different words.
How to decide
Vanguard-style pricing tends to fit a portfolio that is already in index funds, without legacy positions you cannot move, whose needs are allocation, rebalancing and periodic planning conversations. An independent adviser tends to fit a balance sheet with things in it — a business, concentrated stock, real estate, complex estate documents, several account types with different tax treatment — and where you want one person coordinating professionals. In both cases the price should be established in dollars: Form ADV Part 2A Item 5.A requires an adviser to “provide your fee schedule” and to “disclose whether the fees are negotiable.” Ask the independent adviser the all-in annual dollar cost including fund expenses, and compare it with 0.30% of the same balance plus index-fund expense ratios. If the answer is close, the independent adviser is competitive; if it is not, ask what the difference buys and expect a specific answer. Then: whether your current fee is high, how to negotiate it, robo versus human fees, and the underlying value question, is a financial advisor worth it. Published figures change — check each firm’s current Form CRS and Form ADV before deciding. Vanguard’s figures on this page were re-read at the SEC’s adviser database on 21 August 2026: Form CRS dated 30 March 2026, the Personal Advisor Select brochure dated 30 March 2026, and the Digital Advisor and Personal Advisor brochure dated 13 July 2026.
Either destination has a cost before it has a saving, and the switching advisors cost calculator returns the months the price difference takes to repay the transfer-out fee and any tax on holdings that cannot move in kind.