ETF will always relay on the manager or the firm that is handling the ETF so the fees are most often high because of greed.
Invest in Gold or Art that may keep the money in your pockets rather than brokers.
The most prominent ETFs have TER (Total Expense Ratio) of 0.2% and there are many good ETFs with even lower TER 0.1%. Frankly, that's not expensive. The rest fees are the broker fees and these varies greatly. Some have annual custody fees but lower trading fees, some doesn't charge custody fees (e.g. Standard Chartered
Singapore), others have fixed fees liked Internaxx anywhere between €100-180 yearly (they charge €25-45 per quarter depending if you traded something or not). Depending on the amount invested, these are not high fees generally speaking.
Expensive can be managed portfolios, e.g.:
https://www.bcee.eu/en/luxfundsLux Portfolio , all of them have been performing very well, however the entry charges are 2.5% and exit charges 1%, while annual charges of 1% are taken from the fund. Considering the performance, probably it's still worth it if you can't get it done yourself.
I have no experience with Art, I believe that most art we see these days are fake anyway, the originals have long time been stolen and traded for massive amounts of money (greed, human nature of getting reach or possessing something others can't).
As for Gold I am not sure if I would trust these remote storage facilities where you buy online and they store it for you. But buying
physical Gold e.g. in Singapore and storing it myself at one of the dedicated facilities e.g. Certis (Singapore), that could be an option of holding part of the assets. However you pay for the storage and you need to physically go there, so invest time and money. I believe however that gold is a good option if someone is extremely reach and can afford buying 20kg of gold which would be equal to 1% of his assets, just to diversify investment portfolio but not as a main investment.
