Pricing Groups
Pricing Groups: You pay program fees on Edward Jones fee-based accounts based on the value of the assets you hold in your account. Fee-based accounts include advisory accounts (Edward Jones Guided Portfolios®) and managed accounts (e.g., Edward Jones Portfolio Program®), but not traditional brokerage accounts. Program fee rates are tiered. As the value of your account increases, your effective fee rate is reduced. To extend the benefit of this reduction in fees, Edward Jones automatically groups certain accounts together to form a Pricing Group. The total value of the assets of accounts within a Pricing Group will be used to determine the effective fee rate charged to each account in that Pricing Group.
Creation of a Pricing Group: Edward Jones will group two or more fee-based accounts together, subject to the exclusions below, if they are held at the same branch, the account holders have the same mailing address, and the account holders meet one of the following three criteria:
- they are the same person (they have the same tax ID);
- they have the same last name; or
- they have chosen to be in the same Relationship Group with each other.
Relationship Groups: Relationship Groups are groups of accounts that clients voluntarily create linking their own accounts to the accounts of other clients for the purpose of planning and establishing financial goals. They are separately created from Pricing Groups, but membership in a Relationship Group can improve an account's ability to meet the necessary criteria to join a Pricing Group. You will know if you are in a Relationship Group because you would have agreed to it with your Edward Jones financial advisor, received confirmation of your Relationship Group at the time it was created, and your regular account statements will list the other accounts in your Relationship Group and their owners. A corporate, association, partnership, or formal living trust account in a Relationship Group will be excluded from a Pricing Group if it does not share a beneficial owner with another account in that Pricing Group.
Linking of Accounts: To be part of a Pricing Group, an account only needs to fulfill the Pricing Group eligibility criteria with one other account. As a result, if an account owned by one person fulfills the Pricing Group eligibility criteria with an account of another person, then all eligible fee-based accounts of both individuals will be automatically grouped together. Another person can link a fee-based account with that Pricing Group if their account fulfills the Pricing Group eligibility criteria with a single account in that group.
Government Entities: Accounts held by government entities can only be grouped with other government entity accounts if they are held at the same Edward Jones branch, have the same mailing address, and use the same tax ID number for tax reporting. Government entity accounts cannot be grouped with individual persons or non-government entities.
Eligible and Excluded Accounts: Individual, joint, informal trust, sole proprietorship, guardianship, committeeship, TFSA, and registered retirement accounts are all eligible to be in a Pricing Group. The eligibility of corporate, association, partnership, and formal living trust accounts to be in a Pricing Group is described in the Relationship Group paragraph above. Other account types, including, but not limited to, formal testamentary trust and investment club accounts, are excluded from Pricing Groups.
Privacy and Opt-Out: The grouping of accounts may enable members of a Pricing Group to infer the existence of other group members' accounts and give an indication to group members of the total value of the accounts in the Pricing Group. If you would like to opt out of a Pricing Group, please contact your Edward Jones financial advisor. The Edward Jones Client Information Privacy Notice has additional information about how we collect, use, disclose, and protect your personal information.
Please contact your Edward Jones financial advisor if you have questions about Pricing.