[Villages Kahuna]

It seems to me that if you are a brand new customer, that Ameriprise's $500 fee is reasonable. I'd be a lot more sensitive to the ongoing fees a financial advisor would charge to manage your money.

Making a long story short, I went from totally managing my own portfolio to having my Merrill Lynch advisor do it for me. He does it for about 70 basis points a year on the assets that he manages for me. That's more than index funds, but a lot less than most mutual funds.

Another suggestion is to establish some performance benchmarks with the financial advisor up front. That way he will know that you intend to compare his performance to the benchmarks you set ahead of time. That also permits you to know whether to "fire" the advisor if he performs badly to your performance benchmarks. After all, he's working for you--would you permit any employee in a business you own continue to work without a periodic performance review? I would also tell whoever you choose that you expect to have a performance review of his work with your money at least once a year, maybe every six months.

In my case, I initially set an average (weighted to the allocation of my own portfolio) of a couple of common indexes (the Russell 1000, the Lipper total bond market index, etc.) as a benchmark. Now I've proceeded to using the average of about a half-dozen top performing, balanced mutual funds as our benchmark. My logic is that, in effect my advisor is doing the same thing with my money as a mutual fund manager does with the investments of a whole bunch of people. My Merrill Lynch guy, I call him my guru, has beaten my benchmarks every year since we began doing it that way--in some years (like this year) by a lot.