Free · No account · Nothing stored
A percentage of your assets is never sent to you as a bill.
It is deducted quietly, every year, from the money you already have — including from the growth of the dollars it took last year. Physicians price “one percent” against their income and conclude it is small. It is not levied on income. Here is what it is levied on.
What that fee costs you
$877,405
Over 30 years, a 1.00% fee on your assets leaves you with $3,807,618 instead of $4,685,023. You are never invoiced for the difference.
29
years of your own contributions, at $30,000 a year
19%
of the portfolio you would otherwise have ended with
$29,247
a year, on average, across the whole horizon
Nominal returns, compounded annually, with no market variance and no taxes. Real returns are never a straight line. This is a cost calculator, not investment advice, and not every advisor charges a percentage of your assets.
Why nobody has shown you this number
A free net worth dashboard is rarely a product. It is usually a lead list. You connect your accounts, the balances cross a threshold, and a licensed representative calls — because a physician with an eight-figure lifetime earning curve is the most valuable client an asset manager can acquire, and acquiring one is worth far more than any dashboard costs to run.
None of that is illegal, and much of it is disclosed, in a document nobody reads. But it does answer the question of why the software is free.
If your advisor charges a percentage, you are the inventory.
Attending Financial charges for software. We do not manage money, we take no commissions, and we accept no referral fees, so nothing above is a pitch for a product we sell — the calculator works whether or not you ever create an account.
Create Free DashboardFrequently asked questions
What is an AUM fee?
AUM stands for assets under management. An AUM fee is charged as a percentage of everything you have invested — commonly 0.5% to 1.5% a year — rather than as a bill for hours worked or advice given. It is deducted directly from your accounts, so it never appears as a charge you approve, and it grows every year your portfolio grows, whether or not the work involved has changed.
Why does a 1% fee cost far more than 1%?
Because the fee is taken every year, and the dollars it removes would otherwise have compounded for the rest of your life. A 1% fee does not cost 1% of your portfolio — it costs 1% of this year’s balance, plus all the growth that 1% would have produced over the decades that follow. Compounded across a thirty-year career, a 1% fee typically consumes somewhere around a quarter of the final portfolio.
Is paying a financial advisor ever worth it?
Often, yes. Advice on a physician contract, a backdoor Roth with an existing pre-tax IRA, disability coverage, or an estate plan can easily be worth many times its price. The question is not whether advice has value — it is whether the price should scale with the size of a portfolio the advisor did not build. A flat-fee or hourly fiduciary charges for the work. A percentage-of-assets manager charges for the balance. Those are different products at very different prices.
How is this calculator different from the ones on advisor websites?
It runs entirely in your browser. Nothing you type is transmitted, stored, or attached to an account, and there is no form to fill in to see the result. Attending Financial sells software by subscription and does not manage money, take commissions, or accept referral fees — so there is no version of this number that is better for us than the true one.
What assumptions does the calculation make?
It compounds a fixed nominal return annually, treats the fee as a reduction to that return, and adds your annual contribution at each year end. It ignores taxes, inflation, and market variance — real returns are never a straight line. The comparison is against a broad index fund’s expense ratio of 0.05%, not against zero, because self-directed investing is not free either.