We built Ignite because we got tired of watching people get taken advantage of. So a couple things about how we work, right up front.
We don't sell anything. No commissions, no products, no kickbacks — nobody pays us but you. And you pay one number you know before you pay it. There's a conflict baked into percentage fees nobody likes to talk about: ask an advisor who's paid on your balance whether you should pay off your mortgage, and paying it off means taking money out of the account they're paid on. We'd rather not have that sitting in the room.
Mike and Casey would both rather you understand what we're doing than just trust us blindly. If you don't understand it, you won't be comfortable, and you won't stick with it when the market gets ugly. There's a plain-English rundown of every service at the bottom of this page.
“What's this money for?” Not what's the rate of return, not what's the hot fund. What is it actually for, when do you need it, and what does it mean to you? You can't take a cookie-cutter plan and hand it to everybody.
What most advisors charge, as a percentage of what you've got.
What that means on a $1.5 million portfolio — every year, and it climbs as your account does.
What you pay here. You know the number before you pay it, and it doesn't ride on your balance.
Most people fit cleanly into one of these. If you're not sure which, that's what the first meeting is for.
You want it handled
We manage the money and do the planning, year after year. Two plans — Comprehensive and Core.
You want a plan, not a partner
We build you the whole plan over a series of meetings and hand it over. You do the implementing.
You've got a question, or a portfolio
Sit down with one of us and get a straight answer. No engagement, no commitment.
Nobody gets pushed up a level here. If the cheapest thing on this page is what you need, we'll tell you that — and if none of it is, we'll tell you that too.
The honest question isn't how much money you have — it's who's going to do the work. If you want somebody else handling the trades, rebalancing, required distributions, and tax planning year after year, that's the ongoing side, and it's most people. If you'd rather run it yourself with a professional plan behind you, that's the one-time plan. And if you've got one question or a pile of investments you'd like a second opinion on, don't buy a plan — come have a conversation.
Same firm, same people, same standard of care. The difference is how much planning work is in it, and how much of it we handle for you.
Core is built for households with $500,000 to $1 million to invest. Over a million, Comprehensive is your plan.
We'd rather be straight about that than take your money and have you wonder later whether it was worth it. Below $500,000, a $6,500 flat fee is a big bite out of what you've got, and we'll usually point you toward one of the options further down this page. Between those two numbers, Core fits most people just fine. Over $1 million there's enough going on with taxes, required distributions, and estate work that Core wouldn't do right by you. If your accounts grow past the line — and we sure hope they do — we'll bring it up at your annual meeting and move you to Comprehensive for the next year. Always before it happens, never in the middle of a year.
These aren't automatic — they're the things that usually mean there's more going on than Core is built for: you own a business or you're self-employed through an entity; you've got rental property as a business, not just a house or two; you have stock options, RSUs, or one holding that dominates your portfolio; you have a trust or you're looking at estate taxes; or an inheritance, windfall, or inherited IRA big enough to change your tax picture. If one shows up, we'll sit down and talk about whether Comprehensive is the better fit, and why.
If your situation is simple except for one piece, add that piece — don't buy a bigger plan than you need.
Your documents done through Estately, the Heritage Vault red binder, and the conversation that goes with both.
The full analysis — life, disability, long-term care, annuities. We pull the actual policies and read them.
A multi-year income plan with Roth conversion analysis, full Social Security timing analysis, and your guardrails report.
A 60 to 90 minute meeting, plus the prep work behind it.
If you find yourself wanting most of this list, tell us — Comprehensive will cost you less than buying it a piece at a time, and we'll say so.
Some people want the plan without the ongoing relationship — maybe you like running your own money, or you just want to know you've got it right. We build it over a series of meetings, walk you through it, and you take it from there. Two versions, because somebody in their thirties and somebody two years from retiring don't need the same thing.
Come back inside a year and decide you'd rather we just handle it, and the whole fee comes off your first year of Comprehensive or Core. Nothing lost for trying it your way first.
Everything else. You open the accounts and move the money, place every trade, rebalance every year after that, take your own distributions, and run the conversions in the right years. When your life changes, you update the plan.
We're not watching it. No annual update, no phone call from us when the market drops. That's the deal, and for the right person it's the right deal. A plan is also a snapshot, built on your life and the tax law as of the day we write it — so plan on a fresh look in two or three years.
Not everybody needs a financial plan, and we're not going to sell you one to prove otherwise. Sometimes you've got a question and you want a straight answer from somebody who isn't trying to sell you an annuity. No intro meeting needed for these — just book it and come on in.
Ninety minutes with one of us. Bring whatever you've got — the 401(k) statement you don't understand, the annuity somebody's pitching you, the question about when to take Social Security. We'll tell you what we think and you'll leave knowing what to do next. No plan, no engagement, no follow-up calls from us afterward.
We look at everything you own — what it costs you, what it's actually doing, and whether the mix fits what the money is for. It's a meeting of up to 90 minutes, followed by a written rundown by email: what we'd change, and exactly how to implement it. This is the one for somebody who's been doing fine on their own and just wants a professional set of eyes on it.
Comprehensive and Core are billed quarterly — drawn from your investment account or paid from cash flow, check or card, whatever works for you. A one-time plan is split in two: half when we start, half when we hand you the plan. An Ask Me Anything or an Investment Review is billed at booking.
Core accounts are held at Betterment, which is what lets us keep the price where it is — their system handles the trading, rebalancing, and monthly withdrawals automatically. Betterment charges 0.15% a year, taken out of the account. On $600,000 that's $900 a year, about $75 a month. That money goes to Betterment, not to us. Their portfolios also hold a small cash position, around half a percent.
Core is capped at $1 million in investable assets. If your accounts grow past that, we'll bring it up at your annual meeting and move you to Comprehensive for the next year. We'll always tell you before it happens, and never in the middle of a year.
Because a lot of this is what people expect from an advisor.
Our industry loves its jargon. Here's what we're actually talking about.
Think about your spending in retirement like driving up a mountain road — sharp drop-offs on both sides, and the guardrails keep you in the middle. This report puts a guardrail on each side of your spending: a number you shouldn't go above, and one you shouldn't go below. As long as you're between them, keep going and enjoy yourself. If the market moves enough to push you against one, we call you and we adjust. It answers the question most people are really asking: am I going to be okay?
Your tax preparer is looking in the rearview mirror — telling you what already happened last year. Our job is to look through the windshield. We run your actual tax return through software that pulls out the numbers that matter: your bracket, your deductions, and how much room you've got before the next bracket. Then we plan around it. We have to pay our share, but we don't have to leave Uncle Sam a tip.
The Core version, and it's in every Core meeting. Where is your money coming from this year, which account should it come out of, and how much should you have withheld so April isn't a surprise. Straightforward, and it's the piece most people are actually missing.
Your financial plan, and it lives online so you can get to it whenever you want. All your accounts feed into one place, so you see your whole picture instead of logging into five different websites. It's also where we run the what-ifs: what if I retire at 63 instead of 65? What if we buy the camper? There are a lot of levers to pull, and this is where we pull them.
Money in a traditional IRA or 401(k) has never been taxed — and at 73 or 75, depending on the year you were born, the government makes you start pulling it out whether you want it or not, every dollar as income. A conversion means moving some into a Roth now, on purpose, and paying tax at today's rate. From there it grows tax-free and never gets taxed again. Done a little at a time over several years, it can save a lot of money — sometimes six figures.
Once you hit your RMD age — 73, or 75 if you were born in 1960 or later — the IRS makes you take a certain amount out of your retirement accounts every year. Miss it and the penalty is steep. We calculate it, we take it out, and you don't have to think about it. That's in both ongoing plans.
Once you're retired, money has to actually show up in your checking account, same as when you were working. We set that up so it runs on its own — the right amount, out of the right account, at whatever frequency you want. You shouldn't have to log in and sell something to pay your electric bill.
This isn't your stock-and-bond mix — it's which account each investment sits in. Some investments throw off taxable income every year, and those belong in your IRA where it doesn't matter. Others are tax-friendly and belong in your regular account. It costs you nothing to do it right, and over a couple decades it saves real money.
Over time your winners grow and throw your mix off — you set out to be 60% stocks and now you're 70% without doing a thing. Rebalancing sells a little of what's up and buys some of what's down to get back on target. It feels backwards. It's also how you end up buying low and selling high without having to guess what the market's going to do.
When something in your regular investment account is down, we can sell it, book the loss to offset gains on your taxes, and buy something nearly identical right away. You stay invested the whole time, and you pick up a deduction you'd otherwise have left on the table.
You can claim as early as 62, at your full retirement age, or wait until 70 and get a bigger check. If you're married, you've got both claiming ages to work with, plus survivor benefits. The gap between the best choice and the worst one is often more than $100,000 over your lifetime. In Comprehensive and the Freedom Blueprint we model the scenarios; in Core we look at your numbers and give you a straight recommendation.
A checkup, which is in Core, means we look at what you already have and tell you if there's a hole in it or something obviously wrong. A full analysis means we pull the actual policies — life, disability, long-term care, annuities — and figure out what you're really paying and what you're really getting. A lot of what gets sold out there is stupid expensive, and people have no idea.
An online tool we use to get your estate documents done — will or revocable living trust, powers of attorney, healthcare directive. Here's the slightly morbid part, but somebody has to say it: if you and the kids were driving to church on Sunday and got hit by a bus, where does everything go? Who makes decisions for you? These documents answer that. Without them, the state answers it for you.
It's a red binder, and it's hard to miss on a shelf. Estately sets up the legal documents; the Vault is the other half — it tells your loved ones where everything is, and what to do with it. Inside there's a labeled spot for every document and account your family would have to hunt down if you weren't here, and every section works both ways: one side tells you what to add, the other tells your executor what to do with it. When somebody dies, the family is grieving and suddenly supposed to track down thirty things they've never laid eyes on — we've watched it take the better part of a year. With the Vault it's one place, and it's already done. Comes standard with Comprehensive, or with the Estate add-on to Core.
Your asset allocation is your mix of stocks, bonds, and cash. In Comprehensive we build it around your situation from scratch. In Core you get a model portfolio — a well-built mix off a set menu, matched to your goals and your stomach for risk. Either way it's low-cost index funds. None of us is smart enough to know what's going to jump tomorrow, so we'd rather own the whole pie. When one slice decides to get bigger, we own that too.
And it's a judgment-free zone. We'll ask what this money is for, look at what you've got, and tell you honestly which of the three doors fits — or whether you even need us right now. Some people don't, and we'll say so.
Schedule your free first meetingAny questions on any of this, just give us a holler.