“Fiduciary” might sound like a buzzword in the financial planning world, but rest assured it’s a word that deserves its reputation — and if the vast majority of Americans polled in the CFP Board’s 2024 survey are to be believed, it’s not just a fancy financial term but a necessity: 97% of respondents wanted financial professionals who provided financial advice, even on only one occasion, “to act in the client’s best interest.” In other words: to be held to the fiduciary standard.
But how do you become a fiduciary in the first place? What goes into it? What’s so different about a fiduciary’s work, and how might a fiduciary financial planner price their services for clients? Becoming a fiduciary isn’t as straightforward as claiming the title; it requires years of hard work, meeting specific standards, and adhering to the industry’s strict ethical guidelines.
We’ll explore these questions and more on our blog today, including plenty of lived-in, rich insights from Greg Liszka (CFP®, RICP®), President & Advisor at Iron Point Financial, who has a been a fiduciary as long as he has worked in the industry. To find out more about all things fiduciary-related, read on…
1. How Do You Become a Fiduciary? (Regulatory Backdrop)

Let’s start with the simplest question: how do you become a fiduciary? The short answer is that you have to work hard to qualify as one. For instance, as Greg points out, “If you are a CFP®, you are, by default, a fiduciary in every case.” So if ever you see the CFP® certification next to someone’s name, you can trust they have undergone rigorous financial education, and passed arduous ethical, experiential and regulatory standards, to qualify as a fiduciary.
*Being a fiduciary is not limited to CFP®s only; other professional designations like ‘CPA,’ ‘CFF,’, and ‘RIA’ imply a fiduciary standard.
Recent Attempts to Change the Law
The longer answer gets a little more complicated, as it turns out that even if you haven’t trained to be a fiduciary in any official capacity, you could still be liable and accountable to the fiduciary standard if you are giving advice in certain situations — or at least that’s what the recent SEC regulatory changes have been trying to accomplish.
As Greg puts it, those laws were proposed so that, “if you are giving advice, or it can be perceived you are giving advice, then you would now, by default, be a fiduciary.”
To get specific, the Department of Labor’s Retirement Security Rule (Final Rule), published earlier in 2024, sought to expand the definition of a fiduciary to anyone:
- Giving investment advice to a retirement investor,
- for any kind of compensation, including a commission,
- while presenting yourself as a trusted advisor either by explicitly stating you are a fiduciary
- OR by giving recommendations such that a “reasonable investor” would believe you are making those recommendations in said investor’s “best interest,”
- whether for a one-off engagement with this “trusted advisor” or in a long-term client-advisor relationship.
The key is really about how you, as a financial advisor, are trying to come off to clients. In Greg’s words, “Are you holding yourself out as an expert? Are people relying on you for your expertise? Or are you just purely selling them something?”
If you’re upfront that you’re just selling a product, you don’t qualify, but if you are trying to come across as an advisor “acting in your client’s best interest,” you would qualify.
The point of the proposed rule change was all about matching the external picture with the quality of the advice given: the SEC didn’t want people in the financial industry posing as experts and recommending products they would benefit from (e.g. through sales commissions) even if those products weren’t the best choice for the person they were selling those products to.
Precisely because the DOL wanted to expand the definition of a fiduciary under the Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA), they faced considerable lobbying and pushback — especially from big insurance agencies. Greg recalls how,
“Some insurance agencies considered getting rid of their entire securities departments because they did not want their people — who weren’t even licensed to sell investments, but could push certain annuity products, because those were insurance products — to get caught up in the proposed fiduciary standard rule change.
A lot of the time those annuity products can be quite dubious (in my opinion), and they certainly would not meet any fiduciary standard.”
The end result of the insurance industry’s lobbying, litigation, and court appeals was that proposed The Final Rule, which was supposed to come into effect on September 23rd, 2024, was stayed by a federal court in Texas, leaving the original 1975 fiduciary definition intact, and sparing insurance agencies extra regulatory scrutiny… for now.
As we mentioned at the start of this article, the vast majority of Americans seem to want the fiduciary standard to apply whenever financial advice is given by an industry professional. If that’s true, then we could see fresh government legislation in the coming years that makes last year’s DOL changes permanent and unstoppable by any court (as it would be enshrined in law, not just interpreted by the administration).
With all that said, perhaps the short answer to the question, “How do you become a fiduciary?” was the right one after all: you work hard to get qualified as one.
2. What Does a Fiduciary Do?

The essence of fiduciary duty is placing the client’s interests first—no matter what. That means a fiduciary’s daily role can include anything that lives up to that standard. Greg elaborates:
- Straightforward Advice: “The fiduciary standard means I can sit down across the table from you and say, ‘This is straight-up advice. Here’s your problem, and here’s how to fix it…’”
- Ongoing Relationship: Fiduciary advisors typically provide active, continuous financial management: “You’ve hired me to do a job for you, so there’s continual monitoring, with lots of math equations: there’s a process to work towards the best position possible for you.”
- Fee-Only Compensation: Fiduciaries tend to avoid commissions in ongoing client relationships, instead using fees to align their interests with the clients they serve: “A fee is usually based on a percentage of your assets under management. If your assets perform better, so do I: we’re on the same page. And I’m not trying to sell you anything, so there’s no conflict.”
Beyond these three main markers, fiduciary financial advisors will also ensure compliance with regulatory regimes, avoid conflicts of interest in the work they do on your behalf, and generally do what they can to protect your assets.
3. What Pricing Structures Do Fiduciaries Use?

Given that fiduciaries must all act in the best interests of their clients, you might assume they would all have exactly the same billing arrangement — e.g. the “assets under management” (AUM) model Greg mentioned just now — but there’s actually a lot more diversity within the profession.
What is true is that each model is transparent, and each fiduciary works for alignment with their clients’ goals. Here are three models you might come across when working with a fiduciary:
Flat Fees
For smaller, less time-intensive fiduciary services — such as ad hoc 401(k) or other retirement-vehicle-specific advice — you might see a flat fee instead of AUM.
In Greg’s words, that might look something like, “For $100 a month, here are the services we are going to provide. We can assess your existing 401(k) plan and construct an overarching strategy for the future without actively managing it for you in the long term.”
The exchange, in this case, is the monthly fee for the fiduciary’s financial advice, without their continuous, active input or management. This model could work well for clients seeking more limited, specific services, like the ones we have mentioned here.
One-Off Pricing
On an even more granular level, you could find fiduciaries who provided services for a single, one-off fee. Greg describes that scenario with this example: “For $1,500, I’ll look at everything and write you a financial plan. I’ll do it once, present you with the results so you understand them, and that’s it. End of relationship.”
This kind of approach could work well for clients who are either at the beginning stages of their financial journey and do not have much existing capital to invest (so a plan would tell them what they need to do to get to the next stage of their investment journey), or those who want to and have the time and resources to take a very hands-on approach to the advice provided.
AUM…Plus?
There might be other fiduciary pricing arrangements out there, but the third and final one we are going to highlight today is your standard AUM model plus a monthly fee. In Greg’s experience, this is pretty rare, but there are certain situations where it might make sense:
“Oftentimes, advisors charge a percentage on AUM — say, 1% — but they might also have a minimum. Now, they might say, ‘Every client relationship I look after needs to generate at least $5,000 of business for it to make sense for me.’ But if a client didn’t have 1% of $5 million, they wouldn’t make that advisor’s cut…
Even so, he could say, ‘All right, I’ll take your account, but to make this work, you’re also going to pay me $500 a month on top of the 1%.’ So it’s like a ‘right-to-be-their-client’ fee plus the typical fee for asset management — which could work out at $8,000 total, or whatever, so that relationship makes sense for him.”
What Does Iron Point Financial Charge?
Given this discussion of different fee structures for fiduciaries, it would be natural to wonder what model Iron Point Financial uses. Well, as we alluded to earlier, a percentage of AUM is the typical model, and it’s the one we have adopted. Here’s how that works, in Greg’s words:
“As your Registered Investment Advisor (RIA) through Vicus Capital, we are going to charge you an annual fee, which is a fee-for-service, and that’s it.”
Now, there might be one or two circumstances in which we would adopt a slightly different approach — for instance, we are not against helping you get set up with an IRA or a 401(k), which would be a one-off transaction for which we would earn a commission — but those services don’t tend to be as common when we’re talking about the fiduciary standard.
4. Is Breach of Fiduciary Duty a Crime? (Ponzi Schemes)

Is breach of fiduciary duty a crime? Absolutely! That’s a very hard yes, and it could potentially come with severe legal and professional consequences. As Greg frames it, “A breach of fiduciary duty will get your licenses pulled, it will get you massive fines, and, depending on how bad it is, you could end up in jail.”
How exactly would that worst-case scenario come about? “There are certain things you just can’t do: breaching fiduciary duty, lending money to clients, borrowing money from clients — those will get you thrown in jail pretty quickly. That stuff is career-ending, and possibly life-ending (metaphorically speaking). There’s a huge weight to fiduciary duty.”
Bernie Madoff: What Not to Do
If fiduciaries are supposed to act in their clients’ best interests, then Bernie Madoff’s business was a playbook in what not to do; he violated fiduciary principles left, right and center. Greg’s take on Madoff’s shady practices goes like this:
“If you’re my client, you will never write me a check directly, and I will never produce a statement for you — that’s what Bernie Madoff did: ‘Write the check out to Bernie, with a capital B!’ When his clients came in, he would just print out their ‘statement,’ which he probably just made in Excel after changing the number, and tell them, ‘Look how well you did!’
If you needed a new roof, he would write you a check for $10,000… and that’s exactly how Ponzi schemes work: he would hope that the next person would come in to cover that last check, and so on.”
All of which goes to say, transparency and a clear separation from client funds are critical to building trust and avoiding conflicts of interest as a true fiduciary financial planner. That’s the way we do it, anyway:
“At Iron Point Financial, we are completely separate from your money. We don’t have it. Maybe Cetera, or Fidelity, or whoever has it. We don’t. They’re always the ones producing your statements, and they get sent directly from them, not us. If you want to log in and see it, you go to their website. Our website just as a link to their website.”
Last Words: Why Choose Iron Point Financial?
At the end of the day, we believe that fiduciaries — whether defined by the current laws, or the ones to come — should be committed to providing unbiased, client-focused advice, whether for a single job or a lifetime.
That’s what we’re committed to at Iron Point Financial. Our goal is to listen to you so we can really understand who you are and what your goals are, and then tailor a one-of-a-kind financial plan for you that we can work through together long-term.
The professionals on our team have worked hard to be called fiduciaries, and they’ve done it with your best interests in mind. If you are interested in working with someone like that, why not schedule an appointment today, so we can help guide you in the direction of your dreams?
And if you enjoyed this blog answering the questions, “How do you become a fiduciary?” and “Is breach of fiduciary duty a crime?” and you wanted to hear more from us, why not sign up here for updates straight to your email inbox?
Iron Point Financial is here to empower you to secure a brighter tomorrow. We operate physical offices in Grove City, PA and Greenville, PA.
We primarily serve residents of Pennsylvania, Ohio, West Virginia and Florida but we also have registered broker licenses for 22 other states across the continental USA.
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Disclosures
Information is provided by Iron Point Financial and written by Clearsound Consulting LLC, a non-affiliate of Cetera Advisor Networks LLC.