Michael Kitces
- Podcast Host, Financial Advisor Success
- Publisher, Nerd's Eye View
- Host, Kitces and Carl - Real Talk for Real Financial Advisors
Reston
One nerd’s perspective on the financial planning world… CFP, #LifelongLearner, Entrepreneur-In-Denial, Advisor #FinTech, & publisher of the Nerd’s Eye View blog
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Articles by Michael Kitces
When Keeping Your Options Open Is Riskier Than Making A Commitment: Kitces & Carl 201
Executive Summary One can argue that financial planning is, at its core, about navigating different choices and trade-offs. Some decisions can have outsized practical, financial, and emotional impacts, such as when to retire, quit a job, or start a business. Succeeding and failing will each bring high consequences, and many people opt to "keep their options open"… but does that, too, have a cost?
Outsourcing And Managing Client Headcount To Stay Lean As A Two-Founder, $150M Firm: #FASuccess Ep 511 With Ashlee deSteiger
Executive Summary Welcome everyone! Welcome to the 511th episode of the Financial Advisor Success Podcast! My guest on today's podcast is Ashlee deSteiger. Ashlee is the co-owner of Gunder Wealth Management, an RIA based in Birmingham, Michigan, that oversees approximately $150 million in assets under management for 100 client households.
XY Planning recruiting spikes as RIA M&A refugees flee rollups that dangle downer contracts
Brooke's Note: Between about 1995 and 2025, RIAs literally flipped the script on Wall Street. The model won by providing better advice to investors and providing a better life to the people administering the advice. All the hoopla about scale, brand, resources and the easy plug-and-play life of a suitability-standard, Merrill Lynch broker turned out to be mostly bunk. All that scale hoopla made a giant comeback of late, but this time the call came from inside the RIA house.
XY Planning recruiting spikes as RIA M&A refugees flee rollups that dangle downer contracts -- Amazon, Google, and Fidelity are the second set of X factors feeding the boom
Brooke's Note: Between about 1995 and 2025, RIAs literally flipped the script on Wall Street. The model won by providing better advice to investors and providing a better life to the people administering the advice. All the hoopla about scale, brand, resources and the easy plug-and-play life of a suitability-standard, Merrill Lynch broker turned out to be mostly bunk. All that scale hoopla made a giant comeback of late, but this time the call came from inside the RIA house.
Creating Effective Discovery Meetings To Convert 100% Of (High-Value) Prospects Into Clients: #FASuccess Ep 510 With Michael Yoder
Executive Summary Welcome everyone! Welcome to the 510th episode of the Financial Advisor Success Podcast! My guest on today's podcast is Michael Yoder. Michael is the founder of Yoder Wealth Management, an RIA based in Walnut Creek, California, that oversees approximately $400 million in assets under management for 64 client households.
Fidelity's move to kick sub-$100-million RIAs off its platform is 'bizarre,' Kitces says; it’s likely to backfire, Chalekian says; yet, the Fidelity-Savvy deal last week may soften any blow
Fidelity has shocked – but not shocked – the RIA industry; it’s not only done with sub-$100-million RIAs, but it's also sending them packing – one source wonders whether Fidelity's Savvy deal last week's adds more to its story. The No. 2 Boston RIA custodian delivered the hard news in a short letter on its stationery to presumably hundreds or thousands of financial advisors who are likely small, state-registered firms.
Articulating The Evolving Value Of Financial Planning To Prospects: Kitces & Carl 200
Executive Summary Given that financial advice is usually, to say the least, not inexpensive, financial advisors often need to be prepared to explain their fee in the context of the value that is offered.
Slant and FinTurk debut new forms tools
An advisory firm's client onboarding and financial planning process is only as efficient as the data-gathering tools that it uses. As soon as a prospect becomes a client, the advisor needs to start collecting data on the client's household and financial situation, as well as getting paperwork out to the advisor's custodian for opening new accounts and transferring funds.
Systematizing Your Differentiated Service As A (True) Retirement Expert While Scaling To $850M Of AUM: #FASuccess Ep 509 With Dana Anspach
Executive Summary Welcome everyone! Welcome to the 509th episode of the Financial Advisor Success Podcast! My guest on today's podcast is Dana Anspach. Dana is the founder of Sensible Money, an RIA based in Scottsdale, Arizona, that oversees $850 million in assets under management for 330 client households.
Pontera announces non-discretionary 401(K) management tool
Most financial advisors bill on an AUM basis, which works well when their clients have assets for them to manage (and bill on), but runs into problems when the client either doesn't have the assets to meet the advisor's minimum, or when the client's assets aren't available for the advisor to manage.
FINNY pivots to a 'pay-as-you-grow' revenue-share model
New business and revenue generation is one of the primary challenges of financial advisors.
Funding for alternative investment distribution continues to swamp SaaS solutions
Alternative investments have gotten a lot of attention for their growth in recent years, yet they still remain a relatively small part of the overall investment landscape. For example, there is around $20 trillion invested in alternative assets like private equity and debt, hedge funds, and real estate, but that's a relative drop in the bucket compared to the estimated $318 trillion in combined global public equity and fixed income outstanding.
Wavvest launches in-house RIA
The economics of owning an RIA are vastly different from those of selling software. Software companies generally sell subscriptions at flat-fee rates rarely exceeding a few hundred dollars a month, and generally need multiple staff members for engineering, support, and sales, whereas an advisory firm can be run by a single advisor (with or without in-house support) and charge $10,000+ per client per year.
Altruist is acquired by Vanguard to vertically integrate asset management and custody
And strike a blow in the battle over ETF revenue sharing Historically, the economics of RIA custody rested on three main pillars: Ticket charges on trades, various revenue sharing payments from mutual fund companies (from sub-TA fees to data sharing agreements), and net interest income on cash (i.e., the difference between the amount of interest the custodian pays on cash in a client's account and the amount that they receive from lending those dollars out in margin loans), all of which...
Leveraging Video The Right Way To Add $1M Of New Revenue In Less Than 12 Months: #FASuccess Ep 508 With Nate Hoskin
Executive Summary Welcome everyone! Welcome to the 508th episode of the Financial Advisor Success Podcast! My guest on today's podcast is Nate Hoskin. Nate is the co-founder of SageContent, a platform that supports financial advisors in creating video marketing content.
Breaking Bad News To A Client About Prior Problematic Financial Decisions: Kitces & Carl 199
Executive Summary When a financial advisor engages a new client, they are analyzing a lifetime’s worth of financial decisions that have brought the client to this point. While this often includes many great decisions, it is also likely that a client has mis-stepped along the way… or at minimum, made suboptimal decisions for their goals.
Growing Bigger For Succession And Then Intentionally Downsizing For A Simpler Lifestyle Practice: #FASuccess Ep 507 With Carolyn McClanahan
Executive Summary Welcome everyone! Welcome to the 507th episode of the Financial Advisor Success Podcast! My guest on today's podcast is Carolyn McClanahan. Carolyn is the founder of Life Planning Partners, an RIA based in Jacksonville, Florida, that oversees $300 million in assets under management for 65 client households.
Building A ‘Killer’ Scorecard To Track Key Weekly Metrics On The Path To $275M AUM: #FASuccess Ep 506 With Jenna Biancavilla
Executive Summary Welcome everyone! Welcome to the 506th episode of the Financial Advisor Success Podcast! My guest on today's podcast is Jenna Biancavilla. Jenna is the founder of Pearl Capital Management, an RIA based in Phoenix, Arizona, that oversees approximately $275 million in assets under management for 110 client households.
The Temptation To Take On More Clients To Build (3X) Enterprise Value: Kitces & Carl 198
Executive Summary If the initial stages of building a firm are mostly about survival and prospecting, and the middle stages are about scaling teams and processes, then the latter stages of the firm become about determining what is "enough".
Using A “Pillow Test” To Make The Hard Business Decisions On The Way To $3.5B AUM: #FASuccess Ep 505 With Andrew Rosen
Executive Summary Welcome everyone! Welcome to the 505th episode of the Financial Advisor Success Podcast! My guest on today's podcast is Andrew Rosen. Andrew is the executive chairman of Diversified, LLC, an RIA based in Wilmington, Delaware, that oversees approximately $3.6 billion in assets under management for 2,500 client households.
Advyzon rolls out AI features
Every piece of technology was new at one point, and even the most widespread technology today was once only used by a small group of early adopters who saw its potential and were willing to try it out, live with the initial bugs as the software got improved, and take the risk that it might not last for the long term.
Taking Your Growth To The Next Level By Building An Authentic Personal Brand: #FASuccess Ep 504 With Sheri Fitts
Executive Summary Welcome everyone! Welcome to the 504th episode of the Financial Advisor Success Podcast! My guest on today's podcast is Sheri Fitts. Sheri is the founder of Sheri Fitts and Co., a marketing, event, and consulting business that works alongside financial advisors and firms. What's unique about Sheri, though, is how she helps financial advisors develop their personal brands to both stand out in the eyes of good-fit clients and to ensure their work is in sync with their values.
Feathery raises $30 million for its AI workflow automation and account opening tools
But do RIAs need another ‘digital onboarding’ solution? Running an RIA often requires striking a balance between providing personalized service to meet each client's unique needs and using standardized processes to be able to operate at a scale that's large enough for the business to sustain itself.
Hadrius and Greenboard raise series A funds
In November 2022, when the release of ChatGPT kicked off the rapid proliferation of AI tools throughout the marketplace, one of the immediate follow-up responses was something like, "OK, this is cool… but what is it really useful for?".
'AI-native' CRMs are proliferating
The CRM has been a core part of the advisory firm tech stack for many decades: first as a digital Rolodex of client contact information, then as a repository of client meeting notes and supplemental information, and eventually as a hub for workflows and task management built off of the data stored within the CRM system.
‘What does this agent actually do?’
The rise of AI within advisor technology has come along with a lot of new jargon for users and evaluators of new technology to learn. Words like 'context', 'instance', and 'intelligence', which are all common words outside of AI, have completely different meanings when used in regard to AI. But one of the most confusing AI-related words right now is 'agent'.
AI notetakers roll out new capabilities to defend through expansion
Because "disruption" in AdvisorTech is rare (due to the slow pace at which advisors change their technology at all!), it's notable when newcomers really do experience rapid growth and adoption. For which AI notetakers is arguably the fastest-growing new AdvisorTech category ever, with providers like Jump and Zocks reaching upwards of 40,000 advisor users in barely two years.
Incumbents strike back against standalone AI tools
At the end of November in 2022, ChatGPT went into public release and took the world by storm.
Helping Clients Align Their Capital To What’s REALLY Important When They Don’t Know What Is: Kitces & Carl 197
Executive Summary The value of financial planning often stems from helping clients realize their goals… both in the literal financial sense of managing cashflow and in the figurative sense of determining what those goals actually are. The former is often 'just' a question of good planning, but the latter takes continual time and investigation.
Arca emerges from 'stealth mode' with $48 million capital raise
The financial advisor business has long used various formulas to allocate and split up the revenue associated with a (new) client. In the "old" days, the rough rule of thumb was a 25/25/25/25 split between whoever was able to Find them (i.e., sourced the prospect), Bind them (i.e., get the prospect to sign and become a client), Mind them (i.e., provide the service), and Grind them (i.e., do the administrative paperwork grind).
WealthReach raises $1 million in seed funding
For most of our history as financial advisors, "marketing" your practice meant "prospecting", the process of going out and sourcing new people who might someday do business with you… usually via either cold outreach (e.g., cold-calling or cold-knocking), or creating opportunities to connect and meet people (e.g., going to networking meetings, or hosting a seminar).
Will there be benefits for all these centralized-data-warehousing efforts?
The typical financial advicer lives with three core components to their advisor technology stack: CRM, portfolio management, and financial planning software.
Edward Jones takes minority stake in Quicken
Will deal expand its technology capabilities for advisor-led financial planning? One of the longest-standing constraints to doing financial planning for clients is that it's difficult to look across all the domains of their financial household to provide advice, if their financial household isn't in good order in the first place.
Organically Growing To $800M AUM In Less Than A Decade By Investing In Educational Marketing: #FASuccess Ep 503 With David Brooks
Executive Summary Welcome everyone! Welcome to the 503rd episode of the Financial Advisor Success Podcast! My guest on today's podcast is David Brooks. David is the founder of Retire SMART, an RIA based in Omaha, Nebraska, that oversees approximately $800 million in assets under management for 1,000 client households.
Managing $240M As A 3-Person Team Through A Structured Meeting Approach: #FASuccess Ep 502 With Wendy Ciehanski
Executive Summary Welcome everyone! Welcome to the 502nd episode of the Financial Advisor Success Podcast! My guest on today's podcast is Wendy Ciehanski. Wendy is a senior wealth advisor within the RIA Composition Wealth, where her Columbus, Ohio-based practice oversees approximately $240 million in assets under management for 156 client households.
Your Feedback Requested – Reader Survey For Nerd’s Eye View (2026)
LOGIN or CREATE AN ACCOUNT TO SAVE ARTICLE TO YOUR LIST Executive Summary As financial advisors, we are no stranger to the incredible benefits of long-term compounding. From the fact that a future retiree can save $1M by 'just' saving $300/month and investing it into a diversified growth portfolio that can grow at 8% annual for 40 years from age 25 to 65.
When ‘Feelings Are Data’ To Navigate Clients’ Financial Planning Trade-Offs: Kitces & Carl 196
Executive Summary Some decisions are largely matters of data and analysis. Yet more often, that analysis informs a decision with trade-offs, such as funding retirement or education. Given that we all work with limited resources, financial data is crucial to inform how each dollar may function in these circumstances… yet the data does not produce the definitive right answer. Which raises questions about the 'other' type of data: feelings.
Navigating Succession Planning That Doesn’t Turn Out As Expected (Even When You’re Doing Everything Right): #FASuccess Ep 501 With Rick Kahler
Executive Summary Welcome everyone! Welcome to the 501st episode of the Financial Advisor Success Podcast! My guest on today's podcast is Rick Kahler. Rick is the founder of Kahler Financial Group, an RIA based in Rapid City, South Dakota, that oversees approximately $300 million in assets under management for 130 client households.
Amplifying Business Growth By Constantly Honing Your Time Towards Its Highest-And-Best Use: #FASuccess Ep 500 With Michael Kitces
Executive Summary Welcome everyone! Welcome to the 500th episode of the Financial Advisor Success Podcast! My guest on today's milestone podcast is me, interviewed by Kitces.com Financial Planning Nerd Adam Van Deusen.
The Client Engagement Trap And Balancing Touchpoints Vs Rapid Responsive Service: Kitces & Carl 195
Executive Summary In the time between review meetings, advisors are often busy doing work for clients (such as portfolio analysis or reviewing insurance needs). This cadence of work is crucial, but it’s also often invisible, especially when no action is needed. The antidote for many advisors is some sort of communication between meetings – from birthday cards to phone calls to email newsletters.
4Xing To $200M AUM In 4 Years While Staying Lean By Leveraging AI, Technology, And Outsourcing All You Can Let Go Of: #FASuccess Ep 499 With Ryan Townsley
Executive Summary Welcome everyone! Welcome to the 499th episode of the Financial Advisor Success Podcast! My guest on today's podcast is Ryan Townsley. Ryan is the owner of Town Capital, an RIA based in Bel Air, Maryland, that oversees approximately $200 million in assets under management for 155 client households.
Hiring A COO And Creating Partnership Paths Early To Drive Enterprise Value On The Path To $3B AUM: #FASuccess Ep 498 With Christine DeMao
Executive Summary Welcome everyone! Welcome to the 498th episode of the Financial Advisor Success Podcast! My guest on today's podcast is Christine DeMao. Christine is the Chief Operating Officer of Gibson Capital, an RIA based in Wexford, Pennsylvania, that oversees approximately $3 billion in assets under management for 200 client households.
Suze Orman Is Wrong About Dividend Stocks in Retirement — and She Isn't Alone
On a recent episode of her podcast, Suze Orman made the point that she invests in dividend stocks so that they will continue to pay income even if the markets go down. In another episode, she noted, "A great deal of my money is in dividend-paying stocks because I do want income once I stop earning income. I would like to live off the interest in everything, not my principal." She compares investing in high-dividend stocks to the yield an investor would receive from Treasury bonds.
Introducing New CE-Eligible Podcast And Level Up Case-Study Training For New Advisors, And the State Of The (Nerd’s Eye View) Blog
Executive Summary As markets bounce back from spring turmoil to new record highs this summer, and growth of financial advisory firms continues unhindered by the purported threat of AI, the industry has shifted an ever-greater focus onto the challenges of scaling firms as they grow, and coming up with ways to tackle the emerging shortage of experienced advisor talent.
Is It Ever Appropriate To Engage Clients With Fear Of Adverse Outcomes To Persuade Them To Action?: Kitces & Carl 194
Executive Summary Financial advisors often struggle with a frustrating reality: clients routinely delay important planning decisions even when the benefits seem obvious. Estate planning is a particularly common example, as many clients acknowledge the need to update documents, establish trusts, or clarify legacy intentions… yet fail to take action.
Growing From Solo To Silo’ed Partnership To A $3.3B Enterprise Ensemble (Without Taking Outside Capital): #FASuccess Ep 497 With Shane Morrow
Executive Summary Welcome everyone! Welcome to the 497th episode of the Financial Advisor Success Podcast! My guest on today's podcast is Shane Morrow. Shane is the CEO of IronBridge Wealth Counsel, a hybrid advisory firm based in Austin, Texas, that oversees $3.3 billion in assets under management for 2,600 client households.
Salesforce, RightCapital, And YCharts Launch Their Own New AI Capabilities (And More Of The Latest In Financial #AdvisorTech – July 2026)
Executive Summary Welcome to the July 2026 issue of the Latest News in Financial #AdvisorTech – where we look at the big news, announcements, and underlying trends and developments that are emerging in the world of technology solutions for financial advisors! This month's edition kicks off with the news that Salesforce, RightCapital, and YCharts have all launched their own new AI capabilities, from internal notetakers to capture meeting notes, to analyzers that help to craft better planning...
AI 'vibe coding' tools are making the AdvisorTech Map bigger, not smaller
If a person wants to build and sell a piece of software, there's traditionally been a fairly significant upfront cost in doing so. Building software has required knowing how to code, and so the first step for someone who isn't able to write the code themselves is to hire a developer or engineer to come up with the initial prototype of the product, and then to test, iterate, and improve upon it until it's finally ready to sell to the public.
Lessons Learned From Building A $60B Advisory Enterprise: #FASuccess Ep 496 With Shannon Eusey
Executive Summary Welcome everyone! Welcome to the 496th episode of the Financial Advisor Success Podcast! My guest on today's podcast is Shannon Eusey. Shannon is the chairman and co-founder of Beacon Pointe Advisors, an RIA based in Newport Beach, California, that oversees $62 billion in assets under management for 25,000 client households.
Survey shows that clients don't mind (disclosed) advisor AI use, as long as they know they can still talk to a human
Every time there's a potentially transformative development in advisor technology, it seems to trigger a fresh round of debate over what the value of an advisor really is. When mass-market spreadsheet tools like VisiCalc and Lotus-1-2-3 and later Excel first came out, people wondered whether there was any need to pay a financial planner to run cash flow projections and time value of money calculations when consumer tools could do it themselves with software at a fraction of the price.
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