What You Actually Pay at Apriem — and Why We Price This Way

Prospective clients increasingly research advisors before ever picking up the phone, and financial advisor fees are usually the first thing they check. We’d rather explain our pricing plainly than have someone piece it together from a fee schedule buried in an SEC filing. Here’s exactly what we charge, why the structure looks the way it does, and how we handle the one real conflict of interest in our business model.

Our fee schedule

Apriem’s advisory fee is a percentage of the assets we manage, billed quarterly in arrears:

Portfolio balance	Annual fee
First $5,000,000	0.95%
Next $5,000,000	0.75%
Next $10,000,000	0.50%
Above $20,000,000	Negotiable

For a household with $1–2 million under management, that means a flat 0.95% — the top of our range, because the entire balance falls in the first tier. We’re not going to pretend that’s the cheapest option on the market. A handful of digital-first advisors and some large-scale RIAs charge less at that asset level. What we’d ask a prospective client to weigh is what’s included at that price, because it isn’t just portfolio management.

If a household wants planning without an ongoing AUM relationship, we also offer project-based financial planning for a flat, one-time fee of $500–$10,000 depending on complexity (half due upfront, balance due at delivery), and estate planning for $250–$2,795. These aren’t marketing figures — they’re the fee ranges filed in our Form ADV Part 2A, Item 5.

What’s actually included at 0.95%

Our advisory fee isn’t a fee for trade execution or model-portfolio rebalancing alone. Clients get:

• Ongoing investment management and rebalancing
• Comprehensive financial planning
• Tax planning coordination
• Estate planning coordination
• Risk management and insurance needs analysis
• Access to the team for planning changes as life circumstances change, without a separate per-project fee

For a $1–2M household with real planning complexity — a business interest, aging parents, a blended family, an upcoming liquidity event — the AUM fee is functioning as a bundled planning-plus-management fee, not just an investment management fee. Compared against paying separately for a fee-only planner, a portfolio manager, and periodic estate/tax coordination, the math is often closer than a headline percentage suggests. We’re not going to claim it’s the right fit for every household at that size — a client who wants investment management only, with no ongoing planning, may reasonably find a lower-cost option elsewhere. That’s a fair trade-off to name directly rather than obscure.

We also negotiate fees case by case — based on relationship tenure, complexity, and family/related-account aggregation — so the scheduled rate is a ceiling, not always the final number.

The insurance conflict of interest, stated directly

Apriem Advisors is also a licensed insurance agency, operating as Apriem Insurance Services, and some of our advisors are licensed insurance agents. That is a real conflict of interest, and we say so in our Form ADV rather than downplaying it: when an advisor recommends an insurance product that Apriem Insurance Services sells, there’s a financial incentive at play that wouldn’t exist if we only recommended unaffiliated products.

Here’s how that’s actually bounded in practice:

• Insurance activities account for less than 1% of Apriem’s total revenue*. This is not a business built around insurance sales — it’s a small, ancillary piece that may be used when insurance is appropriate as part of a client’s broader financial plan.
• Advisors do not directly receive commissions** on insurance products sold through Apriem Insurance Services (a small number of legacy relationships with unaffiliated carriers are the exception, and those are disclosed).
• Clients are never obligated to act on an insurance recommendation through us. Any client can take an insurance recommendation to an unaffiliated agent or carrier instead, and we say so explicitly.
• As a registered investment adviser, Apriem owes clients a fiduciary duty — recommendations have to be in the client’s best interest regardless of how a product is sold.

We’d rather a prospective client know this going in than discover it later and wonder why it wasn’t mentioned. The conflict is real, it’s disclosed, and it’s structurally small relative to the business.

The honest summary

Apriem’s AUM pricing is not the cheapest available, particularly for households in the $1–2 million range, and being an SEC-registered adviser that’s also a licensed insurance agency does create a disclosed conflict of interest around insurance recommendations. Both of those things are true, and both are manageable in the context of what a client actually receives: comprehensive, ongoing planning bundled into the fee, negotiable pricing based on relationship and complexity, a flat-fee planning-only option for those who don’t want an AUM relationship, and hard limits (sub-1% of revenue*, no direct advisor commissions**, no obligation to buy) on how far the insurance conflict can actually affect a recommendation.