Earning well doesn't automatically mean you're building toward financial independence. And reaching financial independence doesn't automatically mean you stay there. At both stages the decisions are genuinely complicated, the windows are often narrow, and the mistakes tend to be permanent.
That problem is exactly what I built this firm to solve. I have 15+ years of experience in financial services, including 13 years on the institutional side of the investment industry at J.P. Morgan and Cohen & Steers, working with financial advisors and institutional investors on complex investing and tax strategies. That experience gave me a clear picture of how serious money is managed, and an equally clear picture of what most individuals were getting instead.
I also had a problem with the fee model most advisors were charging (1% of your assets annually). As your portfolio grows, their invoice grows, whether the work changed or not. It's the only professional service that works this way.
So I built a firm on a flat fee instead.
Our clients work in industries where company stock is a meaningful part of their compensation. Some are mid-career, focused on optimizing every vest and keeping the tax drag down. Others are approaching or already in early retirement, navigating a long time horizon, the gap before Medicare, and turning what they have built into income they won't outlive. We work with clients on both sides.
Many people I meet with are losing sleep over the things they can't control. They can tell me last quarter's return on a single fund. Yet they have never run the numbers on whether they can stop working.
The financial industry is built to sell products to solve problems, but many of those could largely be prevented by better planning. The product gets sold, the underlying problem stays, and the complexity is used to justify the fee. My test for whether you're caught in that is simple: if you can't explain your portfolio to your spouse in five minutes, there's a good chance someone is selling you something you don't need.
Good financial advice is a philosophical product before it's a technical one. The math matters, but it only works once you're clear on what the money is for.
But the technical side still has to be right, which is why the credentials are a must. I hold the CFA and CFP® designations. The CFP covers the full breadth of financial planning. The CFA is the gold standard for investment analysis. Together they mean one person is responsible for both the plan and the portfolio, so nothing falls through the cracks between the two. And as a fee-only fiduciary, I don't earn commissions or sell products. Your interests and mine point in the same direction.
If you want to see how this shows up in the portfolios we build, read How We Invest.
Guiding Employees At:
A specialist, backed by a team
At most firms, the person who wins your business is not the person who does your work.
Here's how it often goes: You meet a senior advisor and they pitch you a grand vision. You sign. Then your tax question routes to a junior analyst, your portfolio is maintained by someone else, and by year three you get a letter introducing your new relationship manager.
That might be the way to run a firm with hundreds or thousands of clients, but for the vast majority of people, it's not what you signed up for.
At Simplify Wealth Planning, the person you meet is the person who does the work. Whether the hard part of your situation is a concentrated employer stock position, or a thirty-year retirement withdrawal strategy, the analysis and the recommendation come from the person you built trust with. In order to preserve the integrity of this model, we plan to cap this practice at roughly 50 ongoing client relationships, because that's what keeps the previous sentences true.
Even that might sound like a lot for a small team, but we don't do it alone.
SWP is an Investment Adviser Representative of Core Planning, an SEC-registered investment adviser managing over $500 million of client assets across a nationwide team of more than 60 independent, fee-only advisors. This matters because compliance professionals who don't report to me oversee recommendations, trading, and communications. Another benefit is that if anything unforeseen happens to me, there are people at Core Planning with access to your records who can help. A one-person advisory firm cannot say that.
This is crucial in how we run our business, since it means much of the operational load sits with Core Planning and frees up my calendar to spend more time serving clients well.
You get the depth of a larger firm and the focus of a specialist.
