You have an advisor. You're not sure it's enough.

Who this is for: people with meaningful assets and an existing advisor, who suspect they are getting an investment manager when what they need is a financial planner. If that is you, a second opinion answers the question directly, and it costs nothing.

When a second opinion makes sense

Most of the people who ask for one are reacting to a specific signal. The common ones:

• Your reviews are about performance and markets. They are almost never about taxes, Social Security timing, Roth conversions, or your actual retirement income.
• Something changed. You retired, sold a business, inherited money, got a large equity grant, or lost a spouse, and the advice did not change with it.
• You cannot say plainly what you pay, all in, including the fund expenses inside the portfolio.
• You have never seen a written plan. You have statements and a risk questionnaire from years ago.
• You have concentrated company stock and the only advice you have gotten is to hold it, or to sell all of it, with no tax modeling behind either.
• You are doing the coordination yourself, between the advisor, the CPA, and the estate attorney, because nobody else is.

What we actually look at

A real review covers two sides. The first usually gets more attention than the second.

The portfolio

• Total cost: the advisory fee plus the expense ratios of everything inside the accounts. The second number surprises people.
• Tax efficiency: whether the taxable accounts are holding the right things, and whether anyone is harvesting losses or managing distributions.
• Concentration: how much of your net worth sits in one stock, one sector, or one employer, and what the plan is to reduce it.
• Fit: whether the allocation matches your actual timeline and income needs, or just a generic risk score.

The plan

• A retirement income map: which account funds which years, and in what order.
• A multi-year tax projection, including whether the low-bracket years before RMDs are being used for Roth conversions.
• Social Security timing, and how it interacts with the rest of the income plan.
• RMD and IRMAA exposure, which a big income year can trigger two years later.
• Beneficiary designations and account titling, and whether they still match your intent.
• How equity compensation, deferred comp, and any pension election are being handled.

In our experience, the most meaningful gaps are often on the planning side. The portfolio is usually fine, or close to it.

What you get, and what it costs

The first conversation is 30 minutes and free. If you want a full review, you send recent statements, your last tax return, and any estate or equity documents. A week or two later you get a written summary: what is working, what is missing, what it would cost to fix, and a plain recommendation on whether a change is worth it.

There is no fee for any of this, and no obligation to become a client. Blackshire is fee-only, so the review is not a setup for a commission somewhere else. If your current arrangement is serving you well, that is what we will tell you.

What a second opinion is not

• It is not a sales pitch. If it is not a fit, we say so, and we tell you what to look for elsewhere.
• It is not a teardown of your current advisor. Plenty of them do good work. The review is about your situation, not their reputation.
• It is not pressure to move your accounts. Nothing transfers unless you decide, later, that it should.

If you decide to make a change

A transition is phased, not a single stressful day. Accounts are held at Charles Schwab, you keep your own logins, and we move things in a sequence that manages the tax consequences rather than ignoring them. Most people who switch describe the actual process as anticlimactic, which is the goal.

If you want the full picture of how we work, that is on the services page. If retirement income is the pressing issue, the free calculators in the Retirement Hub are a good place to start on your own.

The questions we hear most, answered