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Altruist Plans To Launch A New Corporate RIA (And More Of The Latest In Financial #AdvisorTech – June 2026)

June 1, 2026 07:04 am 0 Comments CATEGORY: Technology & Advisor FinTech

Welcome to the June 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 Altruist is planning to launch a corporate RIA for advisors who want some level of compliance and technology support while remaining functionally independent – which is a first for a major RIA custodian that isn't in the business of actually being an RIA, but may make sense given that the economics of RIA custody are so favorable compared to technology and services that the corporate RIA doesn't actually have to be that profitable as long as it can draw a significant amount of advisors (and their client assets) onto Altruist's custody platform?

From there, the latest highlights also feature a number of other interesting advisor technology announcements, including:

Flourish has debuted a platform where advisory clients can compare and obtain mortgages – and by eliminating some layers of costs, is actually able to offer better interest rates than can normally be found on the retail market, creating an opportunity for advisors to add tangible value for clients in a planning area they don't often focus on
TaxStatus has announced a new embedded tax planning function, powered Advice.ai, which generates planning recommendations based on the client's tax data piped directly from the IRS – marking one of TaxStatus's first ventures into forward-looking planning (ironically at the same time as many similar features are rising up to compete with the longtime market leader Holistiplan)
RISR, which makes software for advisors who work with business owner clients to help them grow and protect the value of their business, has released a new AI document analysis tool to expedite review of business tax forms and buy-sell agreements – showing how the use cases for AI document analysis are starting to trickle down from broad-based applications like review of personal tax returns and investment statements into more niche client types

Read the analysis about these announcements in this month's column, and a discussion of more trends in advisor technology, including:

A new survey of high-net-worth investors suggests that although clients feel neutral to positive about whether or not their advisors use AI in general, they are more wary about specific use cases that get in the way of the client-advisor relationship (such as AI-generated recommendations and client communication), and strongly disapprove of advisors not disclosing their use of AI
Despite many claims that expanded access to inexpensive 'vibe coding' tools will collapse the AdvisorTech landscape as advisors drop their software subscriptions in favor of custom homemade solutions, the reality is that the number of technology options is increasing even faster than before – because in reality, advisors don't want to build their own software, but the lower bar to building and developing technology means that a greater number of narrower-purpose point solutions are starting to emerge, solving problems for advisors that previously didn't have a large enough market to support a dedicated tech solution

And be certain to read to the end, where we have provided an update to our popular "Financial AdvisorTech Solutions Map" (and also added the changes to our AdvisorTech Directory) as well!

*To submit a request for inclusion or updates on the Financial Advisor FinTech Solutions Map and AdvisorTech Directory, please share information on the solution at the AdvisorTech Map submission form.

Weekend Reading For Financial Planners (May 30–31)

May 29, 2026 02:00 pm 0 Comments CATEGORY: Weekend Reading

Enjoy the current installment of "Weekend Reading For Financial Planners" - this week's edition kicks off with the news that amidst reports that Charles Schwab is moving to boost its provision of advisory services to wealthier clients (potentially putting them in competition with RIAs that seek similar clients and use Schwab as their custodian and as a referral source), the firm indicated it doesn't anticipate coming into direct competition with the RIAs it serves often. That assurance might be cold comfort, though, to RIAs who might see Schwab's push as heightening the competitive landscape, perhaps leading some to look for a new custodian that doesn't have its own wealth management division and/or seeking to further differentiate themselves in the eyes of their ideal target clients.

Also in industry news this week:

A survey identifies several factors driving differences in RIA employee compensation (and how much each contributes), including geographic region, years of experience, and business development responsibilities
Data from Fidelity showed a 41% increase in the number of Roth conversions being made by investors on its platform during the first quarter (perhaps spurred on by the market decline that occurred in March)

From there, we have several articles on tax planning:

How advisors can work with clients to assess the role of private company equity in their compensation package and proactively make decisions on how to handle it (which could ultimately result in significant tax savings)
Key planning moves for when a client experiences a liquidity event, from allocating newly freed-up cash to planning for a potentially larger tax bill
While putting early-stage growth company stock in a Roth IRA might seem like an attractive option, advisors can play a valuable role in ensuring clients don't run afoul of "Prohibited Transaction" rules

We also have a number of articles on cash flow planning:

Different ways parents can support their children facing increasing housing costs, from contributing a down payment 'match' to making an intra-family loan
Why the decisions of whether and how to support adult child's housing costs goes beyond financial considerations to include family dynamics and the child's sense of independence
Five tax-friendly strategies parents could consider when helping a child buy a home

We wrap up with three final articles, all about writing:

What one author learned from writing 500 blog posts, with the importance of consistency topping the list
Six tips for becoming a better writer, including the benefits of reading extensively and the importance of clarity
How financial advisors can leverage their day-to-day experiences (and the common questions clients ask) to produce valuable written content

Enjoy the 'light' reading!

Challenges In Engaging The Disengaged Spouse Of A Client Couple: Kitces & Carl 191

May 28, 2026 07:03 am 0 Comments CATEGORY: Kitces & Carl Podcast

Kitces & Carl Ep The 'Disengaged' Spouse

In modern financial planning, there is an increased emphasis on engaging both partners in a client couple; reasons for this range from better understanding the household’s goals, ensuring everyone is heard equitably, and retaining one partner in the event of a disaster. Yet the reality for many couples is that financial decision-making, like many aspects of household management, naturally evolves into a division of labor based on interest, temperament, and strengths. And in some cases, forcing equal participation may actually create unnecessary friction rather than deeper engagement!

In this 191st episode of Kitces & Carl, Michael Kitces and client communication expert Carl Richards discuss how to engage both partners of the relationship – and if it is necessary at all on a regular basis. As a starting point, the term "disengaged spouse" itself carries an implicit judgment – suggesting that one partner’s lack of enthusiasm for financial planning is a problem to be solved rather than a preference to be respected. In practice, many so-called disengaged spouses are not irresponsible or uninformed; they are simply disinterested in the mechanics of financial planning and comfortable delegating that responsibility to their partner and planner. Just as couples commonly divide responsibilities around parenting, home maintenance, or career management, financial oversight may simply be another area where one partner takes the lead. And while advisors often interpret limited meeting participation as a risk factor, some clients may feel relieved when they are not pressured to attend recurring planning meetings that they find tedious, stressful, or inconsistent with how they naturally process information.

At the same time, recognizing a spouse’s disinterest does not eliminate the need for inclusion altogether. Effective planning still requires understanding both partners’ values, priorities, fears, and goals – especially during the initial planning process when foundational decisions are being made. The distinction is that involvement does not necessarily require identical participation styles. Rather than insisting every spouse attend every review meeting, advisors may instead look for more flexible and personalized ways to help each person feel heard and understood. For some clients, this may involve periodic vision-oriented conversations rather than technical review meetings. For others, it may mean informal check-in calls, written reflections, or even voice memos shared before a meeting. The goal is not mandatory attendance, but meaningful input.

Two conditions become especially important when one partner intentionally delegates financial responsibilities to the other. First, the disinterested spouse must genuinely feel heard and understood. Advisors and the more financially engaged partner need to actively create space for that person to express concerns, priorities, and preferences in whatever format is most comfortable. Even if they are not participating in every meeting, they still need confidence that their perspective is represented in the planning process. Second, the disinterested spouse must also accept responsibility for the delegation itself. If they choose not to participate deeply in ongoing decisions, they must still support the outcomes collectively rather than distancing themselves from decisions after the fact. Delegation can work effectively, but only when paired with trust, communication, and shared ownership of the results.

Ultimately, the most effective planning relationships may come not from forcing identical engagement, but from recognizing the diverse ways couples collaborate, communicate, and delegate — and adapting the planning process to support clients where they are most comfortable and best able to thrive.

Long-Term Care And Estate Planning For Childfree Clients: Inverting The Timeline For Lifetime Care Defense

May 27, 2026 07:03 am 0 Comments CATEGORY: Estate Planning

The typical estate planning process entails inviting clients to decide what will happen to their wealth when they are no longer alive (i.e., "who inherits what"), and the selection of individuals who can make financial and health care decisions on their behalf in the event they are incapacitated (whether due to accident or disability or dementia in their elder years). For most clients, these decisions are relatively straightforward: their primary heirs are their children and grandchildren, who can also step in as their medical and financial attorneys-in-fact in the event of incapacitation and serve as executors and trustees after the client passes away. Yet the reality is that nearly 25% of the adult population is "Childfree" – whether by choice or by circumstance – and for those clients, the traditional estate planning process breaks down the moment they realize that there are no children (or other immediate family members) to be named as executor, attorney-in-fact, or trustee.

In this guest post, Dr. Jay Zigmont, founder of Childfree Wealth and Childfree Trust, explores how the unique circumstances of Childfree clients turn traditional estate (and long-term care) planning upside down, to the point that relying on traditional estate documents and their standard provisions can actually cause outright harm to the Childfree client's planning goals.

The starting point is to recognize that for Childfree clients who don't have children, 'just' coming up with someone to serve as attorney-in-fact, executor, and/or trustee, can be a remarkably difficult decision. In the event of having no "obvious" choices in their immediate family, many will defer planning altogether, resulting in a stalled estate plan. In other cases, they may choose a more distant relative, not recognizing the problematic conflicts of interest that arise when their financial and medical decision-maker is also the one who will inherit all the dollars not used (and therefore have a direct incentive to minimize how much of the individual's own money is spent on their care, increasing the risk of elder financial abuse).

In addition, because the focus of estate planning for Childfree clients is disproportionately focused on enjoying and utilizing their money while they are still alive (as there are no children to prioritize for an inheritance), traditional estate planning clauses like limiting distributions for HEMS (Health, Education, Maintenance, and Support) are unnecessarily limiting to trustees of Childfree clients' trusts. Instead, "Exhaustion for Care" provisions (that explicitly grant permission to the trustee to use most or all of the trust funds for the grantor's care while still alive) become crucial to ensure trustees really can safely use the Childfree clients' funds for their needs. And long-term care insurance also becomes a more integral part of the plan, when there are no children (or often any other immediate family members) to provide care.

Fortunately, though, there are a growing range of options for Childfree clients to find proxies who can serve to fulfill their key roles (without putting advisors themselves into the awkward position of serving as trustee and making end-of-life decisions about their own clients). Some states like California and Arizona have state-licensed fiduciaries. Many advisors have local bank and trust companies that are willing to serve (albeit not always for the unique pet, exhaustion-for-care, and other circumstances of Childfree clients). And Zigmont himself created a service called "Childfree Trust" to help solve for the gap for Childfree clients in states that don't have effective local solutions.

Ultimately, the key point is to recognize that the traditional estate planning approach just doesn't work for Childfree clients. Not simply because they don't necessarily have children as immediate heirs that they wish to preserve for and pass on assets to, but because the lack of children often means a lack of caretakers (in the event of long-term care needs), and potentially paralyzing uncertainty about who to name into key attorney-in-fact, executor, and trustee roles, while traditional estate planning documents include terms that can outright limit trustees from fully utilizing a Childfree client's assets for their actual care. As a result, planning for Childfree clients requires a more tailored approach to the unique challenges and goals when serving such clientele.

Earning Premium Planning Fees By Demonstrating Hard-Dollar Tax Savings For Business Owner Clients: #FASuccess Ep 491 With Patrick Lonergan

May 26, 2026 07:03 am 0 Comments CATEGORY: Financial Advisor Success Podcast

Patrick Lonergan Podcast Featured Image FAS

Welcome everyone! Welcome to the 491st episode of the Financial Advisor Success Podcast!

My guest on today's podcast is Patrick Lonergan. Patrick is the founder of Vital Wealth, an RIA based in Clinton, Iowa, that generates $2.5 million in annual advisory fee revenue for approximately 100 client households.

What's unique about Patrick, though, is how his firm is able to charge its business-owner clients annual consulting fees north of $70,000 by offering tax planning strategies that frequently save them hundreds of thousands of dollars.

In this episode, we talk in-depth about how Patrick is able to offer his clients significant hard-dollar tax savings by first taking advantage of what he calls "level one" administrative and bookkeeping opportunities (such as maximizing the QBI deduction or choosing an optimal business structure), how Patrick then moves on to "level two" opportunities where some investment is required on the part of the client (for example, creating and contributing to defined-contribution and defined-benefit retirement savings plans), and how Patrick also considers "level three" strategies that combine sections of the tax code to create tax efficiencies (for instance, by compliantly setting up a micro-captive insurance company).

We also talk about how the tax savings strategies Patrick puts to use are particularly valuable for entrepreneurs who can reinvest in their business (potentially generating profits that exceed any deferred tax burden), how Patrick assesses tax planning opportunities with an eye towards cash flow management for his clients to ensure both their personal and business spending needs are still being met, and how Patrick’s clients have become prolific sources of referrals given their ability to easily explain the hard-dollar value his firm offers to fellow entrepreneurs.

And be certain to listen to the end, where Patrick shares how he transitioned from being an entrepreneur himself in the real estate business to entering the financial advice industry in the insurance channel to eventually going independent and starting his own RIA, how Patrick has handled transitioning legacy clients who live in his small town but who aren’t good fits for his current service offering, and how Patrick has found that persistence and "showing up" every day, even during tough times, has contributed to his success as a business owner.

So, whether you’re interested in learning about a tax-savings framework for entrepreneur clients, charging a premium fee in return for offering significant hard-dollar tax savings opportunities, or the value of cash flow management for entrepreneur clients, then we hope you enjoy this episode of the Financial Advisor Success podcast, with Patrick Lonergan.

Designing A (Scalable) Advisory Firm PTO Policy For Your First Hire And Beyond

May 25, 2026 07:04 am 0 Comments CATEGORY: Practice Management, Research

For many advisory firm owners, deciding how much time to take away from work is largely a personal choice shaped by client needs, business demands, and personal priorities. But once a firm hires employees with their own need to step away from time to time, Paid Time Off (PTO) becomes much more than an individual preference: it evolves into a key part of firm culture, team wellbeing, operational resilience, and talent retention. As our own Kitces Research on Advisory Wellbeing consistently shows, autonomy over time and work-life balance are among the strongest drivers of professional satisfaction, even for highly compensated advisors. Because while compensation matters, there is a point where additional income delivers diminishing returns relative to the ability to enjoy more flexibility and personal time. On the other hand, firms that fail to create sustainable workloads and meaningful opportunities for rest may ultimately face lower morale, reduced productivity, and higher turnover costs than firms that proactively support employee time away from work. And so a well-designed PTO policy is ultimately an investment in employee wellbeing, productivity, and long-term sustainability.

The starting point of an effective PTO policy is a consistent structure. Advisory firms generally structure PTO using one of three approaches: separate leave, single-bank, or unlimited PTO. Traditional separate leave systems divide vacation and sick days into distinct categories (e.g., 15 vacation days and 5 sick days). Single-bank PTO combines all paid leave into one flexible bucket, allowing employees to allocate time according to their own needs. By contrast, unlimited PTO policies put no putative restrictions on the amount of time off available for any purpose – which while theoretically offering maximum flexibility for employees and reducing the administrative burden of tracking PTO accrual, often ends up resulting in employees taking less time off than under traditional plans due to the social stigma of taking the 'most' time off. To that end, although every system has its administrative benefits and burdens, the success of a firm's PTO policy depends less on the number of nominal days off it offers and more on whether employees can realistically use them without damaging their own career growth or creating more operational strain for themselves or their teammates.

Small advisory firms often struggle most with this challenge because employees typically wear multiple hats, and there may be little redundancy across roles. Research shows that advisors in very small teams frequently report greater difficulty taking time off than solo advisors or members of larger firms because there are too few people available to provide meaningful coverage. Which suggests that effectively implementing a PTO policy requires firms to build operational redundancy through cross-training, clear documentation of responsibilities, and managing each team member's workload to accommodate for the possibility of backing up other employees' work. Teams may also need to clarify which operational tasks must continue during absences (e.g., trading and rebalancing and handling client questions and requests) and ensure that more than one person understands each essential workflow to ensure that the firm can stay running smoothly during any team member's time off. All of which can help make sure that employees feel comfortable using the PTO they have available (and actually being fully 'off' from work while on PTO) without worrying about falling behind or burdening coworkers with extra work.

To enact this in real time, firms may choose to put together a piecemeal cross-training plan, training employees on different processes on a weekly or monthly cadence to ensure everyone remains up-to-date on the work they might be expected to cover. From there, every period of PTO becomes an opportunity to ensure that everyone fully understands each other's work – and as the team iterates and builds confidence in covering each others' roles, taking time off can become easier and easier over time. And for certain tasks requiring more specialization, advisory firms may also consider bringing in fractional help to ensure they can genuinely disconnect.

Ultimately, firms that encourage employees to take meaningful breaks, establish realistic workload expectations, and invest in cross-training and redundancy are better positioned to maintain both employee wellbeing and a consistent quality of client service. And importantly, firm owners must model these behaviors themselves. Advisors who encourage employees to take time off while never disconnecting themselves may unintentionally signal that true rest is incompatible with professional success. But when advisory firms thoughtfully design PTO systems that balance flexibility, accountability, and operational resilience – for both leaders and employees – they create healthier teams, stronger firm cultures, and ultimately more sustainable businesses that better serve both employees and clients alike!