Hourly Financial Planning
“What is it?”
We work with you to create a robust and holistic plan around the following areas:
- Investments: provide allocation review and advice for investment accounts such as employer retirement plans, IRAs, taxable accounts, and more.
- Savings: prioritize your savings based on your goals, circumstances, and available discretionary dollars.
- Taxes: help capture every available opportunity to optimize your tax planning, including tax harvesting, retirement income and distributions strategies (RMDs), and Roth conversion analysis. Upon request, we can coordinate with your tax preparer.
- Cash Position: determine how much cash to set aside, grow, and keep readily on hand to meet daily needs, emergencies, and more.
- Insurance safety nets: verify proper protection against unforeseen disability, death, property and casualty. We are not insurance salespeople, so our advice is wholly conflict-free.
- Estate planning: creating a plan to manage and distribute assets after death or incapacitation, with a goal to minimize taxes, protect assets, and provide for beneficiaries. We can coordinate with your estate attorney upon request.
“What do I get?”
- A concise, no-fluff, written financial plan with actionable implementation steps.
- Interactive view of your finances through our portal (if you elect account aggregation)
How much does it cost?
We offer our financial planning advice at a tiered hourly rates (see our Pricing page) assessed on our face-to-face time only: you pay for what you see in action, not some black box solution developed behind the scenes. There are no ongoing payment obligations other than the meetings you request.
“Who uses this service?”
Our clients are typically busy and active individuals and couples.
- You are mid-career high-earning professionals or late-career professional looking to transition into retirement
- You typically follow a Do-It-Yourself approach to personal finances and like maintaining full control of your assets
- You are cost-conscientious and skeptical of traditional financial advisors but don’t mind paying a fair and transparent price for what you need
Investment Account Implementation
“What is it?”
For some of our planning clients that prefer to delegate investment-related implementation, including:
- Portfolio implementation, including investment allocation, dollar-cost averaging, rebalancing. etc.
- Tax planning implementation, including tax harvesting, Roth conversions, income distributions, qualified contributions, etc.
- Transfers, including journaling, systematic account funding, etc.
“Is it mandatory?”
No. This service complements our core financial planning service but is neither required for, nor offered in lieu of, our planning. Our clients are generally able to easily implement these actions based on their written financial plan, and need not pay us to do so. Clients who elect this service do so purely as a matter of convenience. Clients who use our implementation service may take over the reins at any time they choose.
“How much does it cost?”
Our clients compensate us based on assets they place under our management. Our industry-leading asset-based fees are assessed monthly, in arrears, as a percentage of such assets. Please see our Pricing page for our management fee tiers.
“Can I open accounts anywhere?”
No. Currently we work exclusively through Schwab Advisor Services. Therefore, clients who elect this service must open their investment accounts with Charles Schwab Company.
“Who is the typical implementation client?”
Clients who utilize our implementation service are generally:
- Busy and active professionals who don’t have the bandwidth or spare time to dedicate to implementing our investment-related recommendations
- Individuals or couples who have a limited investment-related experience and want to ease into it, or who want to ensure accuracy
- Active clients who find more joy doing other things