Mergers-and-acquisitions lawyer Susan Pravda has spent the last two decades helping her clients buy and sell businesses, frequently steering newly wealthy sellers to advisors who could help them manage their money. But it wasn’t until ten years ago, at age 37, that Pravda herself realized her own portfolio was suffering from benign neglect. “I had a money market fund here, a stock brokerage account there, and a bunch of 401(k) plans floating around,” she recalls. Her investment results were solid, if not spectacular. But Pravda wondered whether she might have fared better if she had followed her own advice to clients and hired a pro to help her devise a custom portfolio.

So she delegated the day-to-day running of her and her family’s multimillion-dollar portfolio to BNY Mellon Wealth Management, allowing her to concentrate more fully on her own legal practice and managing the Boston office of law firm Foley & Lardner, where she is a partner. “I’m glad I didn’t wait another five years to act. Bringing in someone to help manage our portfolio allows me to focus on my job and my family,” Pravda says. (She and her husband, the Hungarian Consul General in Boston, have two children, 12 and 14.) Her friends may balk at what advisory firms charge high-net-worth clients; BNY Mellon’s fees, for exam-ple, are 1.25 percent on $1 million to $2 million in assets (subject to a $15,000 minimum), with a declining scale for higher asset levels. But for Pravda, “Getting professional advice is worth the cost.”

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