Fee rebate received from YourShare

I signed up with YourShare.com.au one year ago. Sure enough a cheque for just over $480 arrived last week, along with a comprehensive statement showing all the fees and commissions that YourShare had received from my nominated financial products. Having YourShare as the nominated 'adviser' on my loss of income insurance, margin loan accounts and managed fund investments has had no impact other than my receiving half of the commisions rebated to me. If the total annual fees and commissions eventually exceed $4,000 I'll get back 70% of the amount above $4,000.

There is another company that offers a similar fee rebate service, but it charges an annual fee, so it isn't as useful for investors with modest portfolios. Some financial planners (such as Count Wealth accountants) offer 100% rebate of the up-front application fee for managed funds, but they don't rebate any of the trailing fees (except in exceptional circumstances - Count did rebate the trail on my son's managed fund investment).

Overall I can recommend YourShare to any Australian investors that would like to get some of their trailing fees back each year. If you fill in the online application form, please consider inserting my reference ID: YS3442 on the form. If your rebate exceeds $250 I'll get a $50 referral bonus (paid from YourShare's part of your trailing fees).



Update: The founder of YourShare, Paul Brady, phoned me out of the blue to say thanks for the mention! He also pointed out that another major benefit of YourShare is that you get 100% of any upfront application fees rebated. While you can also get up-front fee rebates from some discount stockbrokers (eg. Commsec) and the Count Financial planner service, they don't rebate any of the ongoing trailing fees. YourShare also rebates the up-front fee for new insurance policies, which others don't offer. In fact, I'm in the process of getting some quotes for personal injury/accident insurance for myself and the kids via YourShare.

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Trail rebates and a free lunch

I got a couple of emails recently from YourShare.com.au confirming that they had finalised the paperwork required to nominate them as my 'broker' for my various various managed fund and margin loan accounts. They should now start to receive the trailing fees paid out by these investment companies, and I'll be sent a detailed statement of the trails paid and a cheque for 50% of the trail amounts on the anniversary of signing up with YourShare.

I also got a phone call from Paul Brady, the director of YourShare, letting me know that he was in Sydney on business and asking if I'd like to meet him to discuss my impression of the YourShare website. We had a pleasant lunch discussing the vagaries of trail payments, and he gave me an estimate of the trail rebate I'd likely get based on the investments I'd so far assigned YourShare as broker - it came to around $540 per year, which was close to my rough estimate. Paul is an accountant by trade, and YourShare appears to be a small business with great potential, given the amount of money most investors are paying in trailing fees without getting any benefit from the advisors or brokers who put them into the investment. One of the nice features of YourShare compared to other similar services is that there is no upfront fee required to sign-up, so you have nothing to lose by trying out the service. Now I just have to wait until next May for my cheque to arrive. I did mention to Paul that it would be nice if the "Your Portfolio" page on the YourShare website listed all trails received to date, and he indicated that this might be added in future.

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