How all-in cost is computed

"All-in cost" is what your portfolio actually costs you to hold for a year, expressed as one number you can compare: total annual dollars and basis points (bps, hundredths of one percent). The point is to surface costs that are easy to lose track of when they are spread across an advisor statement, a dozen fund prospectuses, and a tax return. Ironlake shows the math neutrally; it never tells you to fire an advisor or sell a fund.

The line items

The full Cost & Performance surface adds up four line items into one annual figure:

• Advisor fee. What you pay your advisor, from the fee you record on each account - a percentage of assets under management, a flat annual dollar amount, or both. A household with no advised accounts has a zero here.
• Fund expense ratios. The portfolio-weighted average annual fund cost. With holdings imported (Portfolio Oversight), this is weighted by each fund's actual value; before that, it falls back to the per-class expense-ratio assumptions on your active allocation model.
• Estimated trading cost. A calibrated estimate applied to advisor-managed assets; self-directed and institutional holdings are treated as zero.
• Estimated tax drag. The annual tax owed on taxable portfolio income (see below).

The total is those percentage rates times your portfolio value, plus any flat annual advisor fee recorded in dollars. The same screen then benchmarks only your percentage-based fees - the advisory percentage plus the fund expense ratio - against approximate industry medians for your portfolio size (illustrative reference ranges, not guarantees); tax drag, trading cost, and any flat fee are left out of that fee comparison, because the survey ranges cover percentage-of-assets fees only. It then projects the cost forward.

How tax drag is estimated

Tax drag is split by asset type, because stock and bond income are taxed differently:

• Stocks: a single calibrated rate (a default of 0.5% of equity value per year) that approximates the tax owed on qualified dividends plus the small long-term capital-gain distributions typical of index funds. This is the tax owed, not a gross yield. A calibrated number is more honest than "stock yield times the long-term rate" because the realized, taxable portion of equity income is erratic year to year.
• Bonds: the bond-sleeve yield times your federal marginal rate - taxable interest taxed at your top bracket.

Critically, tax drag is applied only to taxable accounts, and only to federally-taxable bonds. Holdings in tax-deferred or tax-free accounts are excluded, and federally tax-exempt municipal bonds are excluded by their tax character. Treasuries are included, since their interest is federally taxable.

The public calculator vs. the in-product feature

The True All-In Cost calculator on this site is the rough, self-contained version: you enter a portfolio value, an advisor fee, and a fund expense ratio, plus the inputs the tax-drag line needs - a stock/bond mix, your taxable income, your filing status, and a bond-yield assumption - and it returns a directionally correct total using the same tax-drag formula. The in-product Cost & Performance feature replaces those inputs with your actual recorded fees, imported fund costs, and tax profile, and adds the trading-cost line and fee benchmarking. The tax-drag math is shared between the two so the numbers never drift.

Limitations (read these)

• The tax-drag estimate deliberately skips state tax on bond interest, the Net Investment Income Tax (NIIT), asset-location effects, and capital-gain distributions from high-turnover active funds. It is a first-pass cost picture, not a complete tax projection, and it can understate cost where those apply.
• The stock-distribution figure is a calibrated approximation, not your fund's actual realized distributions for the year.
• Trading cost is an estimate from your management mix, not a tally of executed trades (Ironlake places no trades and reads no order history).
• Basis points are hundredths of one percent, so 100 bps is 1.00% of portfolio value per year.
• It is not advice. Ironlake shows the all-in number so you can weigh it; it does not tell you whether a fee is worth paying.

See your own all-in cost