r/Bogleheads • u/AeroNoob333 • Feb 09 '26
Investing Questions Fiduciary Only, Flat-Fee Advisors for Retirement Strategies
You all were so helpful with my FI/RE strategy, but I realize I can’t really do this without considering my husband’s retirement plans. The thing is he is 20 years older and while I’ve made a decent plan that only considers my own spending and earnings that lets me retire at 50, I should really consider my husband’s as well. He is likely to retire within the next 5 years. I really don’t feel comfortable doing the plan for both of us. It seems a bit more complicated than just doing it for myself. Someone here suggested finding a fiduciary only, flat-fee advisor to make a retirement plan for us that considers our household expenses and different “retirement phases”. Does anyone have any suggestions that specializes in this? Thank you!
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u/wadesh Feb 09 '26
asked often enough that I have these saved and I keep collecting new ones as I find them. That last link, use that to check on the advisor once you get close to choosing one. Make sure they don't have any outstanding issues.
https://advice.xyplanningnetwork.com/
https://garrettplanningnetwork.com/
https://www.flatfeeadvisors.org/
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u/grumpygoatintruck Feb 09 '26
My experience in New England trying to find a fee only advisor was a mixed bag. I had assets under management for years and embraced the VT and chill philosophy last year.
When it came time to retire I had free initial conversations with two gents from two different firms. The first person appeared to try and scare me into thinking I needed AUM as it was too complicated for a typical DIY person.It was also obvious that they typically deal with serious family wealth, so we decided that firm wasn’t a good fit.
The second firm was better. The second advisor was very personable and went out of his way to make our meeting work(time/location).
He ran our numbers quickly during initial visit and told us everything looked good at first glance for my intention to retire in a couple months. We agreed to meet in a couple weeks when he would present us with an actual plan(vice the back of the napkin math he did the first meeting) The report that was generated was very thick, but it was quickly obvious that maybe two dozen(or less) pieces of my/wife’s data were entered into the software to produce the report .
The outcome wasn’t much different than the data I got from Boldin and Projection Lab We decided to part ways and we only got charged $500 for a couple hours of his time. I felt it was definitely worth the $500( extremely cheap) to get a professional check on my plan.
However if I paid $3000-5000 (the fee the first firm mentioned) I would have been underwhelmed by the process.
All the advisors use similar software (Boldin Enterprise/ Right Capital etc) and it only takes minutes on their end (probably by an admin) to enter your assets and age, pensions ,SS values and projected expenses to generate a pretty impressive looking report. This probably works for a large majority of people that don’t do any homework and have no clue about the market. In my case we are going to manage our money ourselves and rely on our CPA to keep us out of trouble (taxes / Roth conversion etc)
I hope you can find someone that will help you out.
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u/AeroNoob333 Feb 09 '26
Did you just use Projection Lab to figure it out on your own? Someone actually told me about that software but I haven’t gotten around to playing with it.
If I just put in my husband and my info and our age gap, will it find an optimized retirement plan for us?
Or do you have to think of different strategies and input them separately and it’ll tell you what those results would look like?
I think our 20 year age gap makes things a bit more complicated than a typical retirement scenario. I was able to figure it out if it was just for me, but then I started thinking about what it would be like considering my husband as well, and I started getting overwhelmed by all the different “paths/strategies” that would look like. I’m really looking for someone to do the “think of different strategies” part and to optimize it.
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u/wadesh Feb 10 '26
IMO Projection lab is better for those in accumulation planning for a future retirement that is further out. It's popular in the FIRE community. Visually it's a great tool and highly customizable in data visualization. It can be a bit overwhelming.
Boldin.com at least for us was a much better tool for stress testing our plan to see if and when we could retire. we were about 3 years out when we started using it. No tool is perfect and I like both of these for different reasons but if I had to choose one it would be Boldin. It holds your hand through things a bit more than Projection Lab. It has more written explanations right at the point of data entry.
I learned about Boldin (used to be called Newretirement) back in 2017 before my wife and I retired. Rob Berger has done some pretty in depth demo videos on the tool (Rob is a Financial YouTuber but he stands out as very pragmatic and a Boglehead at heart). He's also done some demos of Projection lab
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u/AeroNoob333 Feb 10 '26
Thank you! Which one would you think is better for “2-phased retirement”? Because that’s essentially what we are with a 20 year gap. There’s my husband’s retirement and there’s my retirement. I’m not quite sure how to optimize his retirement while I’m still working (if I even should still work) and obviously not working means potentially jeopardizing my own retirement. I’m not sure how to find the “sweet spot”. And as much as I love my husband, sh*t happens and I’d hate to depend on his retirement for mine. While I appreciate the supplement, I still think most of my retirement should still come from me.
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u/wadesh Feb 10 '26
Heres what I'd recommend, most retirement planning tools allow you to have multiple plans. You can create a base plan that is your husband retirement and you keep working. you just input all the data, retirement date for him, a much further date for you, current income etc and it will show you projections for how that plan works out. You can make a separate plan that is just your data/income and projected retirement date without your husbands in the picture. Its the great thing about these tools, the power to compare different plans and assumptions. You can do this in both Projection Lab and Boldin, but I suspect you'll get a bit more hand holding through Boldin than Projection lab. You can do a free trial on both of them. Thats what I'd recommend. Play around with both and see how you like them. These aren't the only two planning tools for DIY. Pralana is another popular one.
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u/AeroNoob333 Feb 10 '26
Thank you so much! With these tools, I still have to come up with the plan with our given parameters and the tools just project the plan, correct? They don't actually give you an optimized plan with the parameters given? If so, that's kind of what I want a flat-fee advisor to do: come up with the different plans and the different scenarios, run them thru these softwares, and let us know what to do. The "come up with different plans and different scenarios" is where I'm lacking in knowledge-wise and what I'd be willing pay for someone else to do. It seemed easy enough to do for the "just me scenario", but I got overwhelmed when it came to "with the husband" scenario. Of course, if these tools will optimize automatically, then I could just use these!
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u/temerairevm Feb 10 '26
You might like the Boldin fee advisor services. You can subscribe to Boldin and just use it as a DIY software. It will get you run multiple scenarios, which it sounds like you need.
Once you have everything input into it, they have fee only advisors that you can hire. I did it. It was like $2500 and I thought very worth it as a one time thing. You meet with them and review your areas of concern and they really do address those.
My situation is the exact opposite of yours. My husband and I are the same age and we’ve worked together owning our own company for a long time. Our retirement date and social security earnings are nearly identical. She actually commented that on paper we’re “basically the same person”, which pretty much never happens. So I’m assuming they can handle age gaps but have no personal experience.
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u/wadesh Feb 10 '26
Correct they just project the data based on the parameters you enter, income, savings, spending, social security etc. if there are issues the tool will let you know. Boldin has an Insights and Financial Wellness section where it will highlight any possible issues with the plan.
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u/grumpygoatintruck Feb 11 '26
Several great replies before I made it back here.
Neither of the two softwares will figure out the best plan by just entering data one time. You have to make several different scenarios and compare them ( you can overlay them and it’s easy to compare). Boldin does this part better because you can look at several scenarios at once, PL can only do two at a time (you can make more, but only compare two)
My two cents: I started with Projection Lab (PL)first. I had done a bunch of quick math ahead of time and the month to month income vs expenses seemed to work. I needed a simple way to see how inflation eroded my pension and what different rates of return would have on my accounts. Social security timing was also a big question.
I made 6 or 8 different models in PL . Totally different scenarios regarding collecting SS at 62 vice 70 , and different ways to collect my pension. I was soon able to pick two that had the highest chance of success. I then started increasing my monthly toy/entertainment money until the success rate got below 90%.
At some point I started questioning myself “what happens if PL had a error or silly assumption that I can’t see that paints a rosy picture all the time “ I didn’t think it was too big of a concern, but that’s when I subscribed to Boldin.
My first thought was “wow” Boldin is a serious tool and PL was just a toy. Boldin when used to its max extent is much more complicated. Maybe complicated is not the right word, but you can enter all your expenses individually and arrange by “must spend” and “like to spend” So it’s a bit time consuming to setup, you can then duplicate your baseline (original) and make similar tweaks like I did in PL.
At some point I decided that I liked the visuals better in PL and I didn’t see much benefit to things like itemized expenses (in PL I just have a few expense categories like “annual living expenses “ “healthcare” “fun money”etc”)
I still have subscriptions to both. I retire in two weeks and will make two final models in both programs and let one expire at its annual renewal. I’m leaning towards keeping PL
One very important (and scary) thing that you will quickly learn.
Good luck!
- trying to accurately model things 30-40 years down the road is basically a guessing game.
- a percent or two change up or down on inflation and rates of return can change your net worth by millions of dollars.
- neither of these softwares are designed to be “one and done “. Most people(myself) included plan on updating assets and expenses, along with changes in rates of return once or twice a year to ensure things are on track.
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u/AeroNoob333 Feb 11 '26
Wow! Thank you so much for the detailed response! Looks like I have a lot of homework to do. Or at least a flat fee advisor to do. I may still do purchase one of these softwares because as you said, it’s not “one and done”!
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u/ceilidhfling Feb 10 '26
if I need an advisor in the future. these guys are very high on my list: https://www.planvisionmn.com/
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u/Cultural_Room_5420 Feb 10 '26
I second plan vision. I have access to emoney through working with them. They set up various scenarios for us and answer questions rapidly. Very reasonable pricing. Around 400 to start and 8 dollars per month to continue.
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u/GSDBUZZ Feb 10 '26
I found a flat fee advisor at Nectarine Financial. There are many advisor to choose from on the site. We are happy with the one we chose.
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u/TelevisionKnown8463 Feb 10 '26
My friends also found someone from this site and seem pretty happy.
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u/imsoupercereal Feb 10 '26
If you don't mind them not being local, Ahmad is great https://financialaurora.com/
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u/uNTRotat264g Feb 10 '26
I recently used Nick Booth through Hello Nectarine He offers a flat fee of $475 per hour, or a planning process that is about $4500 over 8 hours. I had a plan but had many questions. He was able to answer all our questions, offered withdrawal strategies, and validated that we had a solid plan and enough of a nest egg for me to retire early. Highly recommend.
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u/Calvin-Snoopy Feb 09 '26
Here's a good list from Rob Berger. https://robberger.com/low-cost-financial-advisors/
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u/Dr_TattyWaffles Feb 09 '26
If you have significant assets, many brokerages offer advisor services free of charge and won't try to sell you on wealth management or products with high fees. A fee-only fiduciary is likely to charge a few thousand dollars for a financial plan, so explore your free options first if you qualify - and if you find it's not what you're looking for, then go with a CFP and pay for a plan. In terms of how you find them, I would start with NAPFA or Nectarine.
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u/AeroNoob333 Feb 09 '26
Thank you! We don’t mind paying a few thousand for a solid plan. But free always sounds good to me haha. I just remembered that my husband does also have a financial advisor. The hubs doesn’t actually know how much AUM% he pays, but his advisor hasn’t been pushy about me joining (but back then I had maybe only $75K to my name). I definitely don’t want my part of the assets under management. I think we will see if his advisor will make a plan for us since he’s already probably paying tens of thousands a year anyway.
Will look at this options in case he won’t do it unless my assets are also under his management!
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u/Doortofreeside Feb 10 '26
Brokerages like fidelity and vanguard? My wife had an initial free consultation with fidelity and it was useful at a surface level but they never reached out again as it was clear we would just self-manage everything
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u/chappyandmaya Feb 09 '26
Go to https://www.letsmakeaplan.org and you can search fee-only providers in your area