High-Wealth Efficiency (The Invisible Fleecing)

Fees that look small as a percentage stop looking small once there's real money behind them — 1% a year on three million dollars is thirty thousand dollars, every year, and the question worth asking is simple: what, exactly, is being bought for that.

This track covers the actual difference between fee-only, AUM-based, and commission-based advisors and how their incentives diverge, the activity bias that leads some advisors to trade more than a portfolio needs, the layered fees hidden inside structured products, and the tax cost of sitting on a concentrated position out of inertia rather than a decision. It closes on something easy to skip past at this level of wealth: passing on not just money to the next generation, but the visibility and habits that kept it intact.