Mom, 61, Discovers Son Paid Commission on Every Trade for Years — Didn't Know About Free Trading

A Surprising Discovery About Trading Fees

A mother who had transitioned to a commission-free brokerage years ago was taken aback when she learned that her adult son was still paying per-trade fees at his original broker. This broker, which he had opened as a teenager, had never been reconsidered, even though the industry had evolved significantly over the years. The son genuinely believed that paying a small fee per trade was simply the norm for investing in the stock market.

How He Ended Up Paying For Something Most Investors No Longer Pay For

The son opened his account around age 18, before commission-free trading became the standard it is today. Since then, he had continued using the same broker into his thirties without ever revisiting the decision. Each trade cost him a flat fee, typically between $5 and $7, regardless of the size of the position. For an investor making a dozen or so trades a year, this added up to a modest but entirely avoidable annual cost.

What A Commission-Free Account Actually Offers Today

SoFi Invest, for example, charges no commissions on stocks, ETFs, or options trades, with no account minimum required to open an Active Investing account. This means that an investor making the same dozen trades a year would pay nothing in trading commissions, freeing that money to stay invested rather than going to a broker on every transaction.

Fractional share investing, starting at $5, is also part of the same account, meaning smaller trade sizes are not penalized any differently than larger ones the way a flat per-trade fee effectively would.

Why This Kind Of Thing Slips Past Adult Children Specifically

Parents who have already gone through the process of comparing brokerages sometimes assume their adult children have done the same, especially once those children are managing their own finances independently. Meanwhile, adult children who opened an account as teenagers, often with parental help at the time, may never revisit that early decision once they are handling things on their own.

This combination of assumptions and inertia is exactly how a fee structure from a decade earlier can persist well past the point where cheaper alternatives became standard.

What The Actual Annual Cost Looked Like Once Totaled

Across roughly a dozen trades a year for several years, his cumulative commission costs ran into a few hundred dollars. While not a dramatic sum on its own, it was completely unnecessary given how widely available commission-free trading has become. None of that money bought him anything beyond the ability to place the trade itself.

What He Is Doing About It Now

He has opened a new brokerage account and is in the process of transferring his existing holdings over rather than selling them outright, to avoid triggering unnecessary capital gains taxes on positions he wants to keep. Going forward, he has also started asking his mother more directly about what she has learned managing her own accounts, rather than assuming his setup from age 18 was still the right one.

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