WHY FEES MATTER

When choosing someone to manage your money there are many factors to consider, but few will impact your account performance over time more than fees. These come in many forms:

• a commission on a stock trade

• a sales load or transaction fee on the purchase/sale of an investment

• a management fee

• underlying expenses that are built into an investment (for example, the expense ratio of a mutual fund)

All of these fees add up, resulting in a drag on your account’s performance. Therefore it’s imperative to limit these expenses as much as possible. What follows are several illustrations comparing Pittenger & Anderson, a fee-only investment advisor, to what’s known as a fee-based advisor. While the names are very similar, the business models are quite different.

Information for the fee-based advisor was found in this document: UBS – Information about your relationship with us. This information may or may not have changed since these illustrations were created, but at the time they were, we believed this to be an objective and fair comparison of the two business models.