The Preflight Check
Big decisions deserve a check before takeoff.
You manage your own money, and you’re good at it. But some decisions are too big to get wrong: retirement dates, house purchases, stock sales, the pitch that insurance salesman keeps making. The Preflight Check is a flat-fee engagement where a full advisory team runs your plan before you commit. You stay in the pilot’s seat. We check the instruments.
Advice only. No AUM. No commissions.
We don’t manage your portfolio, take a percentage of your assets, or earn anything from products you buy. You pay one flat fee, we answer your questions with a written plan, and the controls stay in your hands.
What’s Inside the Check
Every engagement follows a structured analysis, reviewed and debated by your advisory team before any recommendation reaches you.
The Complete Inventory
A full accounting of every account, entity, asset, liability, insurance policy, and estate document, organized into a single working framework. Equity compensation, real estate, and business interests are mapped alongside retirement and taxable accounts, so the analysis reflects your entire financial picture rather than a fragment of it.
The Efficiency Review
An analysis of account structure, asset location, and portfolio overlap. We identify where tax drag can be reduced, where holdings duplicate one another, and where risk exposure sits outside your intended allocation. Structural simplification is frequently among the most valuable outcomes of the engagement.
The Stress Test
Custom modeling of your plan against adverse scenarios: a significant market decline near your target date, a sharp drawdown in a concentrated position, unexpected liquidity demands. The objective is to identify where the plan holds and where it fails while those failures are still theoretical.
The Team Review
Before delivery, your plan is discussed by the advisory team and examined from multiple perspectives: conversion sizing, sale sequencing, timing tradeoffs. Every recommendation must withstand the scrutiny of advisors who are expected to challenge it. This collaborative process is central to how we work.
The Written Plan
Specific recommendations across investments, tax, retirement, and estate planning, each supported by the analysis behind it, sequenced into near-term actions and long-term strategic direction. The reasoning is documented alongside the recommendation, so every decision can be understood, revisited, and defended.
Two plans. One method. Flat fees.
Every plan is the full Preflight Check, applied to your situation. Most clients recognize themselves in one of two.
Ascent
$6,500
For high-income households in the building years, early in the career or deep into it, with decisions arriving faster than answers.
- The savings hierarchy: where each dollar goes once the standard accounts are maximized
- Home purchase analysis and how much house the plan supports
- Equity compensation strategy: RSUs, options, concentrated positions, and tax-aware diversification
- Education funding strategy, 529 plans, and family goals
- An independent review of any product or policy you are being offered
Glide
$7,500
For households approaching retirement, planning an early exit, or already living in it, converting decades of saving into decades of income.
- Retirement and financial-independence timing, modeled against specific dates, whether the date is ahead of you or behind you
- Withdrawal sequencing, RMD planning, and IRMAA management
- Multi-year Roth conversion strategy
- Social Security timing and pension elections
- Spending capacity, quantified, so the plan supports the life it was built for
Custom Engagements
Some situations don’t fit a category, and the method still applies. Custom engagements begin with a conversation. Schedule a call.
The plan is the beginning, not the end
Once your Preflight Check is delivered, your advisory team remains available for additional planning work and one-off questions at our hourly rate, exclusively for clients with a plan presented within the past twelve months. This keeps the advice accurate and consistent, and it means new questions get to work immediately, no new deposit, no re-engagement paperwork, the way you’d work with your attorney or CPA. Adjustments arising from new or previously undisclosed information are completed and billed hourly.
Annual renewals are optional and recommended. A renewal is not a check-in: it revisits assumptions, reviews your portfolio, addresses the year’s open questions, and delivers the same materials and presentation meeting as the original engagement, while extending your hourly access for another twelve months. Renewals are typically priced at 80% of your original plan fee, and because the relationship is established, discovery takes far less time the second time.
Who this is for
The Preflight Check is built for households with financial complexity and the discipline to manage their own investments, typically between $1 million and $10 million in net worth, or household income above $350,000. If your situation runs larger or less conventional, start the intake anyway; if we’re not the right fit, we’ll tell you directly.