💰 Over 99% of What the Investor Pays Never Reaches the People Managing the Money

When St. James’s Place announced that State Street would run its new range of tracker funds for just 0.0075%, the financial press celebrated it as proof that investment costs had reached rock bottom.

But dig deeper, and you’ll discover a startling truth: over 99% of what investors pay never reaches the people actually managing their money.

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The Illusion of Low-Cost Investing

State Street, one of the world’s largest asset managers, will earn less than one-hundredth of one percent for running SJP’s tracker funds. That’s roughly 75p per £1 million invested — an astonishing achievement in efficiency.

Yet the SJP clients investing through these funds will pay around 1.3% per year in total charges once the layers of fund, platform, and advice fees are added together.

Layer	Who Gets Paid	Charge (% p.a.)
Underlying Tracker Fund	State Street	0.0075%
Polaris Fund Wrapper	State Street + SJP	0.20%
Fund Management Margin	SJP	~0.17%
Platform Fee	SJP	0.27–0.35%
Advice Charge	SJP	0.80% (0.25% retained)
Total to Investor		≈ 1.3%

For every £1,000 a client pays each year, roughly £990 stays within SJP’s distribution system — not with the people actually managing the investments.

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Structural Trustworthiness vs. Structural Exploitation

This is not about inefficiency; it’s about structure.
The system is designed to appear competitive while maintaining high margins through bundling, opacity, and vertical integration.

SJP’s scale allows it to negotiate rock-bottom manufacturing costs, yet rather than passing those savings to clients, it captures the spread. The result is a structure where clients are sold “value” through relationships, not through outcomes — a model sustained by dependence, not empowerment.

A structurally trustworthy system, by contrast, would:

• Show clear value flow — who earns what, and why.
• Separate advice from product — eliminating conflicts of interest.
• Empower clients to invest directly at the true cost of production.

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The Moral Question

If 99% of your fees never reach the professionals managing your money, what exactly are you paying for?
Brand comfort? Complexity? Dependence?

Or are you unknowingly financing the very structure that keeps you financially disempowered?

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From Discounts to Premiums: The Age of Empowerment

At the Academy of Life Planning, we call this the shift from Structurally Untrustworthy Discounts (SUD) to the Structurally Trustworthy Premium (STP).
It’s not about cutting costs — it’s about redirecting value toward trust, transparency, and human empowerment.

Investors deserve better than a leaky bucket.
It’s time to build a financial system where 100% of value serves the client’s plan, not the institution’s profit.

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Join the movement to rebuild trust in financial planning.
Explore how the Academy of Life Planning is replacing extraction with empowerment.
👉 academyoflifeplanning.com