01 The visible costs
What each route charges
| DIY (broker + ETFs) | Robo-advisor | Advised (funds) | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Fund costs | 0.07–0.3% | 0.15–0.3% (they use cheap funds too) | 1–2.5% TERs |
| Platform / advice | Commissions per trade | 0.25–0.8% tiered | Sales charges 0–5%, wrap ~0.5–1% |
| Realistic all-in | ~0.2–0.4%/yr | ~0.5–1%/yr | ~1.5–3%/yr |
| What you're buying | Market returns, raw | Packaging + automation | A person across the whole plan |
Ranges from MoneySense's fee guides and published platform pricing, mid-2026. On $100k over 20 years, each extra 1% of drag costs roughly $55k of ending wealth — fees are the one return you control completely.
02 The invisible line item
The fee nobody invoices: your own behaviour
Morningstar's long-running study finds the average fund investor earned about 1.1 percentage points a year less than the very funds they held — bought after rallies, sold into dips, on every platform, at every fee level. That gap is as large as the entire price difference between DIY and advice.
For your money: the cheapest route is only cheapest if you behave identically on it. A DIY investor who panic-sold once in 2020 and once in 2022 paid more than two decades of any adviser's fee — the receipt just never arrived.
For your life: so the honest question isn't "which is cheapest?" but "on which of these do I actually stay invested?" Some people are steady alone. Some are steady when it's automated. Some are steady only when a human they trust says "we planned for this" on a red morning. Price that self-knowledge first; it's worth more than the fee table.
03 Argued properly
The case for DIY
- The maths is unbeatable. A two-ETF global portfolio at ~0.2% keeps essentially the whole market return. Nothing on this page out-earns it on paper.
- It suits a specific person: genuinely interested, reads past the headlines, automates the monthly buy, and — the rare part — has sat through at least one real crash without selling. Temperament, proven not presumed.
- The pitfalls are behavioural, not technical: overtrading (the most flow-volatile funds show gaps near double the average), chasing themes, home bias — the STI is ~30 stocks and a few banks — and quietly stopping contributions in bad years.
- The honest test: what did you do in March 2020 or 2022 — actually, not retrospectively? If the answer is "kept buying, didn't look", DIY is yours. It's the cheapest seat in the market, earned.
04 Argued properly
The case for robo
- It automates the discipline DIY assumes. Diversification, rebalancing and the monthly buy happen without you — for ~0.3–0.6% more than raw DIY. As behaviour insurance goes, that's cheap.
- Singapore's robos are established — tens of billions under management, MAS-licensed, with survivors consolidated after the early shake-out (Smartly and others closed; the remaining players are scaled).
- Its limits are the edges: a questionnaire can't see your whole life — the CPF question, the insurance gap, the flat decision, the parent who needs help. A robo optimises the portfolio it can see, and the expensive mistakes usually live outside it.
- Best fit: the person starting out, building the habit on autopilot — often before, or alongside, the bigger-picture conversations.
05 My side — argued carefully
The case for advice (and when it isn't worth it)
Advice is the most expensive route, so it has to earn the difference — and on portfolio construction alone, it usually can't. Where it earns its keep is everything around the portfolio: Vanguard's long-running framework puts a good adviser's total value at up to ~3% a year in net terms, with about half of that from behavioural coaching alone — episodic, arriving mostly in the years you'd have done the expensive thing.
| What you're actually paying for | Shows up as |
|---|---|
| Behavioural coaching | Not selling in the crash; not buying the mania; the call before the mistake |
| The whole-picture plan | CPF, SRS, insurance, the flat, the parents — sequenced together, not five separate products |
| Tax & drawdown sequencing | Reliefs claimed, withdrawals ordered, CPF LIFE timed |
| Someone accountable | A person who knows you, at 2am-decision moments and life transitions |
If "advice" means someone sells you products and reappears at renewal — that's distribution wearing advice's name, and a robo beats it. Real advice is priced transparently, spans your whole picture, and survives the three questions: how are you paid, what does it cost me yearly, and what's the simplest alternative? I'd rather you DIY well than be "advised" badly.
06 The honest summary
Choosing — knowledge, time, temperament
| You are… | Best fit |
|---|---|
| Interested, disciplined, crash-tested | DIY — take the cheapest seat with pride |
| Busy, starting out, want it automatic | Robo — buy the autopilot, revisit as life thickens |
| Life got complicated — family, CPF, property, parents — or your own behaviour is the risk | Advised — but only advice that survives the three questions |
These aren't rungs on a ladder — plenty of people should mix them (a DIY core, an adviser for the plan) or move between them as life changes. The only wrong choice is the one made for someone else's temperament. And whichever you pick: automate it, diversify it, and stay seated — that's where the real returns were all along.
How advisers are actually paid, what trailer fees quietly cost, and the two Benefit Illustration columns that reveal everything — the economics under this whole comparison, laid out plainly: Inside the industry →
Want to go deeper?
Sources & notes
Figures as of mid-2026. ETF expense ratios (0.07–0.3%): fund factsheets. Robo fee tiers (~0.25–0.8%): published platform pricing. Fund TERs and sales/wrap charges: MoneySense. Behaviour gap (investors earned ~1.1pp/yr less than their own funds, decade to 2023; flow-volatile funds worse): Morningstar Mind the Gap — US data, direction well established. Adviser value framework ("up to about 3%", roughly half behavioural, episodic not annual): Vanguard Advisor's Alpha — their estimate, not a guarantee, quoted with its own caveats. Robo consolidation (Smartly's closure) and AUM scale: industry reporting. STI concentration: index composition.
General information, not financial advice — and given what I do, read my side of this one with the same scepticism you'd read any seller's. Verify any adviser (including me) on the MAS Financial Institutions Directory. Jonathan Wong is a licensed financial adviser representative in Singapore, currently between firms — during that period he is not able to provide financial advice. You can check his registration yourself on the MAS Financial Institution Representatives Register at eservices.mas.gov.sg/rr.