What is Advice-Only Financial Planning?

No mutual funds. No insurance policies. No annuities. No managing your investment accounts for a percentage. You pay a flat fee, you get a plan and someone to talk it through with, and your money stays where it is, in your accounts, under your control.

That’s the whole model. It sounds obvious. It is not how most of the industry works.

The three ways financial advisors get paid

Commission. The advisor is paid by the company whose product you buy. The advice is free; the product is where the money is. This is how a lot of people first encounter “financial advice” — through someone selling a whole life policy or an annuity.

Assets under management (AUM). The advisor charges a percentage of your investment portfolio each year, commonly around 1%. They manage the money and usually provide planning alongside it. No commissions, but the fee scales with your account balance rather than with the work involved.

Flat fee / advice-only. You pay a set price for planning work. The advisor never touches your accounts and earns nothing from what you invest in.

All three can be fiduciary. All three can be honest. They just create different incentives, and it’s worth knowing which one you’re sitting across from.

What “advice-only” actually rules out

The distinction that matters is custody. An advice-only firm does not hold or control your assets. We don’t have trading authority on your accounts. If you decide to implement something we discussed, you log into your own brokerage and do it — or we walk through it together on a call while you drive.

That means there is no version of this where we benefit from you moving money into a particular fund, or from you having more money in the market rather than paying down your mortgage. The recommendation that’s best for you and the recommendation that’s best for us are the same recommendation, because our fee doesn’t move either way.

Who this model fits

Advice-only tends to work well if you:

• Have most of your money in a 401(k), 403(b), or TSP that an outside advisor couldn’t manage anyway
• Are comfortable clicking the buttons yourself, or willing to learn
• Want planning on things that aren’t investments — cash flow, debt, taxes, insurance, equity comp, buying a house
• Don’t have enough investable assets to clear a traditional firm’s minimum, or don’t want to pay a percentage on assets you’ve spent years accumulating
• Want to know exactly what you’re paying, in dollars, before you start

Who it doesn’t fit

It’s a worse fit if you genuinely don’t want to manage your own investments and would rather hand that off entirely. That’s a legitimate preference and an AUM advisor may serve you better. It’s also a worse fit if you want someone to talk you off a ledge in the middle of a market drop by making the trade for you ,we can talk, but we can’t trade.

Being honest about that is part of the point.