Mom, 61, Found Out Her Son Was Paying Commission On Every Trade For Years — He Didn't Know Free Trading Existed

Caroline Lubinsky

Fri, July 24, 2026 at 11:31 PM GMT+3 6 min read

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A mother who had switched to a commission-free brokerage years ago was surprised to learn her adult son was still paying a per-trade fee at his original broker, one he had opened as a teenager and never thought to reconsider since. He genuinely did not know commission-free trading was widely available, assuming that paying a small fee per trade was simply the standard cost of investing in the stock market.

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

He opened his account around age 18, before commission-free trading had become the industry standard it is today, and simply continued using the same broker into his thirties without revisiting the decision. Each trade cost him a flat fee, typically in the range of $5 to $7, regardless of the size of the position.

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For an investor making a dozen or so trades a year, that adds up to a modest but entirely avoidable annual cost, one he had simply never questioned because it was the only brokerage experience he had ever known.

What A Commission-Free Account Actually Offers Today

SoFi Invest charges no commissions on stocks, ETFs, or options trades, with no account minimum required to open an Active Investing account. SoFi Invest's fee structure means an investor making the same dozen trades a year he was making would pay nothing in trading commissions, freeing that money to actually 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 penalize them.

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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, particularly 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.

That combination, an assumption on one side and inertia on the other, is exactly how a fee structure from a decade earlier can persist well past the point where cheaper alternatives became standard.

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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, not a dramatic sum on its own but a completely unnecessary one 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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This article Mom, 61, Found Out Her Son Was Paying Commission On Every Trade For Years — He Didn't Know Free Trading Existed originally appeared on Benzinga.com