Fee-only · Fiduciary · Since 1998
We sell nothing. We are paid a flat fee by the people we advise, we hold no commissions, and every recommendation we make is one we would take ourselves. That is a smaller business than the alternative. It is a better one.
What we do
A firm that claims every specialty has none. These are the four we do constantly enough to be genuinely good at, which is a shorter list than most and the reason it is worth reading.
The question is never really whether you have enough. It is what you are allowed to do with it, and for how long, and what happens to whoever is left. We model that, then revisit it every quarter, because the answer changes.
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Low cost, globally diversified, rebalanced on a rule rather than a hunch. Most of the value is in what we decline to do.
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Coordinated with your attorney, not in place of one. The goal is that nobody spends a grieving year in a probate office.
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When the business is most of the balance sheet, diversification is not a slide in a deck. It is a decade-long project with a tax bill attached, and it should start before the offer arrives.
Read moreRun the numbers
Most growth calculators leave out the one line that changes the answer. Move the fee slider and watch the last row. That gap is the entire argument for how we charge, and we would rather you saw it than took our word.
An illustration, not a projection. Real returns are not a straight line, and no honest advisor will tell you otherwise. The arithmetic here is only meant to show how the pieces relate.
After 25 years
$2.27M
At 1.00% a year, the fee alone takes $491,980 out of this illustration. It is charged on the balance, so it grows every year the market is kind to you — for work that does not.
Talk it through with usIn detail
The decade on either side of retiring is where most of the damage is done — sequence risk, a Social Security claim taken early out of nerves, a tax bracket nobody planned for. We build the drawdown before you need it, so the first bad market is a scenario you have already read.
Who this is wrong for
If you want someone to beat the market, we are the wrong firm. We do not know how, and neither does anyone selling it.
In their words
“They talked me out of an annuity a bank had spent a month selling me. That conversation paid for a decade of their fee.”
“First advisor who ever showed me what the fee actually costs over thirty years. I moved everything the next week.”
“My husband died in March. They handled the accounts, the beneficiaries and the paperwork, and never once mentioned selling me anything.”
“Told me they were the wrong firm for what I wanted and gave me two names. I came back four years later.”
“Sold the company in 2023. They had been planning for it since 2019, and the tax bill was roughly half what I expected.”
“Same advisor for eleven years. She knows my kids' names and my actual risk tolerance, which is lower than I claim.”
“The quarterly reviews actually happen. That sounds like a low bar until you have been with a firm where they do not.”
“They put the flat fee in writing and it has gone up twice in nine years, both times by less than inflation.”
Reviews and ratings invented for this demo. A real advisory faces strict limits on the use of client testimonials.
The firm
The name
The firm is named for a navigational hazard and the light that keeps boats off it. That is roughly the job: not to find you a faster route, but to keep you off the rocks that end voyages.
The practice
We stopped taking new clients twice, both times because we could not have served them properly. A practice that grows past its capacity to return a phone call has changed businesses without telling anyone.
The arrangement
No commissions, no revenue sharing, no fund company paying for shelf space. When the only money we receive comes from the person across the table, the advice tends to improve.
How we are paid
Every firm will tell you it puts clients first. Fewer will put the compensation in writing where you can read it before the first meeting. Here it is, and there is no second page.
Our Form ADV Part 2 says the same thing in the language the regulator requires. A firm that hesitates to hand you theirs is telling you something.
A flat annual fee
Quoted in dollars before you engage us, not as a percentage of a number that moves
Fiduciary in writing
Not a standard we aspire to. A legal obligation we sign
No commissions
We do not sell insurance, annuities, or funds, and we never have
No asset minimum
There is a fee minimum instead, which is the honest version of the same thing
One advisor
The person who plans it is the person who answers the phone
Cancel anytime
No surrender periods, no exit fees, no conversation about loyalty
Request an introduction
Tell us roughly where things stand. No account numbers, no statements, and nothing you would not say to a stranger at a dinner party. The form is live: it reaches Mesa Web Designers exactly the way it would reach the firm.
What that hour looks like
Straight answers
Ask these of us and of anyone else you are considering. The answers are more revealing than the brochures.
End of the demo
Everything you just clicked — the animations, the calculators, the forms that actually deliver — was built by hand for a company we invented, so you could see the work instead of reading about it. Yours would be built the same way, around your trade, your jobs, and the customers you would rather have more of.
Harbor Ledge is a fictional financial advisory firm created to demonstrate this design. The staff, prices, reviews, addresses, and phone numbers shown above are invented and should not be treated as real.
