One decision is
never just one decision.

No, the entire planning engagement is completed without moving a single dollar. If you're looking for ongoing investment management, that's a separate decision made after the plan is built — never a condition of it.

For clients who do choose it, we charge a blended fee: 1% on the first $1 million we manage, and 0.50% on assets above that.

Often, yes. Plenty of people come to us with a plan already, whether they built it themselves, used planning software, or have an advisor. Usually what's missing isn't the plan, it's confidence that there isn't a blind spot in it. If you're still looking, it's usually because the plan you have hasn't answered the questions you keep coming back to.

The work you've done previously is important. It tells us what you've already worked through and where you got stuck. But it isn't the foundation we build on. We take our own measurements and build the plan with you from there. It will either validate what you'd already concluded or conflict with it, and the conflicts are usually where the answers you've been looking for have been hiding. Either way, you'll have what you need to stop wondering.

That's often the best time to start. Walking through the process early is what tells you whether your timeline is realistic. In fact, by going through the planning engagement, our clients often learn they can retire sooner than they thought. The call itself just establishes fit and holds your place, since start dates are scheduled out. There's no obligation created by talking.

Yes to both. As an IRS Enrolled Agent, Ryan is federally licensed to give specific tax advice — you won't hear the "consult your tax professional" disclaimer you get from most advisors. Explicit tax recommendations are built into every plan. And for our clients who engage us in ongoing service, we prepare their return as well, so the strategy and the filing never fall out of sync.

A self-directed plan almost never has the three things people come to us for.

Perspective. You've planned one retirement, your own, and you're seeing it up close for the first time. We've worked through thousands, with people at every stage of retirement. When you're inside your own numbers, the blind spots you can't see are the ones that cost you, and they're rarely a decision you got wrong. They're the opportunities no one pointed out, the assumptions that don't hold, the risks that never made it onto your list. You don't know what you don't know, and that's exactly what a second set of experienced eyes is for.

Expertise. We do one thing and one thing only. Retirement. That specialty is the difference between just running numbers and knowing what to do with them. You've probably seen the alternatives already. An advisor who talks about Roth conversions or withdrawal order in general terms, then tells you to run it by your CPA. Or software that produces an analysis but can't stand behind a single recommendation in it. Both leave you holding the decision, because talking about a strategy and being licensed to advise you on yours are two different things. As an IRS Enrolled Agent, we are that licensed professional. We give the tax advice, build it into your plan, and prepare the returns that carry it out. We don't hand you a recommendation and step back from it. We make the call, we put it in writing, and we own it.

Objectivity. When we build your plan, we're compensated by a flat, transparent fee. There's no product we're trying to place, no commission riding on your decision or shaping the recommendation one way or another. So you're no longer left wondering what's really motivating the advice, or whether there's an angle you can't see. You can take the advice at face value and trust that it was built around the most important thing, which is what's right for you.

What you ultimately stand to gain is a lower chance of a costly, hard-to-undo mistake, and the perspective, expertise, and objectivity that come from working with us.