Fee-based, fiduciary, and focused on business owners. Located on Lake Lansing Road and serving the greater Lansing area and mid-Michigan.
DeMull Financial is a fee-based fiduciary financial planning firm at 2624 Lake Lansing Rd Ste 200 in Lansing, Michigan. We work with business owners, tradespeople, professionals, and 401(k) plan sponsors across mid-Michigan, and the work centers on one thing: connecting tax strategy, retirement planning, and investments so they stop being three separate conversations.
I’m Sage DeMull. I’ve been in financial planning since 2015 and founded this firm in 2023. I hold the PPC® designation — Professional Plan Consultant — which is a retirement plan credential, and that background shapes how I work. Retirement plan design is where I spend most of my time, and for business owners it’s usually the largest lever available.
Fee-based means my compensation comes primarily from advisory fees paid by clients rather than commissions on products. As a fiduciary, I’m required to act in your interest. That isn’t a marketing line, it’s a legal standard, and it’s not universal in this industry.
My fees are published on the about page rather than disclosed after a relationship starts. Planning engagements run on flat annual fees. Asset management is tiered by size. Retirement plan advisory is a declining percentage with a stated minimum. If a prospective advisor won’t tell you what they charge before you’re a client, that tells you something.
The main focus. Entity structure, owner compensation, retirement plan design, tax planning, and eventually exit. Most business owners are good at building the business and have never had anyone map out what the business is building for them.
Irregular income, heavy self-employment tax, and usually no retirement plan at all. The mid-Michigan economy runs on these businesses and they’re chronically underserved by the advisory industry because the assets aren’t there yet. The planning opportunity is frequently larger than it is for a salaried professional.
High W-2 income, equity compensation, deferred comp timing, and fewer levers than a business owner — but the ones that exist matter and are commonly unused.
If your company sponsors a retirement plan, you’re a fiduciary under ERISA whether anyone explained that or not. Investment selection and monitoring, fee benchmarking, documentation, and employee education that actually happens rather than a login handed out at orientation.
The office is on Lake Lansing Road in Lansing. Clients are spread across the Lansing metro — East Lansing, Okemos, Haslett, Grand Ledge, DeWitt, Mason — and further out into Mt. Pleasant, Midland, Alma, and the surrounding communities. Meetings happen in the office or over video, whichever works.
Michigan levies a flat individual income tax, which simplifies some planning relative to graduated-rate states but doesn’t remove the federal levers, which is where most of the opportunity sits anyway.
Michigan’s treatment of retirement income has changed in recent years, with the phased restoration of the retirement income exemption. The practical effect for people approaching retirement is that the state tax picture may look different than it did when they built their assumptions, and it’s worth checking rather than assuming.
State tax rules change. Confirm current treatment with your tax professional before acting.
Some people I tell that their setup is already in good shape. That happens and it’s a fine outcome.
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Fees vary by structure. Flat-fee planning engagements commonly run from a few thousand dollars to $20,000 or more per year depending on complexity. Asset-based management typically ranges from roughly 0.50% to 1.25% annually, declining as assets increase. Hourly work is often $200 to $400. DeMull Financial publishes its full fee schedule on its about page rather than disclosing it only after engagement.
The most common arrangement nationally is an asset-based fee around 1% annually on the assets managed, though this declines meaningfully at higher balances. Flat-fee and hourly arrangements are increasingly available and often make more sense for business owners whose complexity is not proportional to their investable assets.
It depends on whether the advisor is doing planning or only managing investments. For a business owner, the value usually comes from coordination between tax strategy, retirement plan design, and investments, where the savings from a single structural decision can exceed the annual fee. For a simple situation with no business and no tax complexity, low-cost index investing on your own is often reasonable.
A fiduciary is legally obligated to act in the client's best interest, disclose conflicts of interest, and make recommendations based on the client's circumstances rather than on compensation to the advisor. In practice that means the fee structure is disclosed up front and recommendations are not driven by which product pays more.
Fiduciary is a standard of care, not a separate job title, so the useful question is whether a given advisor is acting as a fiduciary and when. Some professionals act as a fiduciary for advisory work but under a lower suitability standard for certain product sales. Asking an advisor to state in writing when they are acting as a fiduciary is a reasonable request.
DeMull Financial is located at 2624 Lake Lansing Rd Ste 200, Lansing, MI 48912. The firm serves clients throughout the Lansing metro area including East Lansing, Okemos, Haslett, Grand Ledge, DeWitt, and Mason, as well as Mt. Pleasant, Midland, and surrounding mid-Michigan communities. Meetings are available in person or by video.