Guides › Switching Financial Advisors
Updated July 31, 2026. Quick answer: your money is safe and it has not moved. Your advisor did not hold your assets — the custodian does, and the custodian is a separate institution that is unaffected. Your positions, your balances and your beneficiary designations are exactly as they were. What changes is who services the account, and the firm will normally assign someone quickly. That assignment is provisional: you can keep the person, ask for a different one at the same firm, or move the accounts, and there is no deadline on any of those.
The distinction that matters: adviser, firm, custodian
The adviser gives advice and places trades. The firm employs them and holds the client agreement. The custodian holds the securities and cash. When the adviser dies, only the first link breaks. Separately, SIPC covers the failure of a brokerage firm up to $500,000 per customer, including a $250,000 limit for cash — but SIPC is about firm failure, not about an individual’s death, and it explicitly “does not protect against the decline in value of your securities.” Neither situation is what has happened here.
What to do, in a low-pressure order
This week: call the firm’s main line, not the adviser’s direct number, and ask who is now assigned and in what capacity. Confirm in writing that no discretionary trading will occur until you have spoken. Check that automatic transactions you rely on — distributions, contributions, required minimum distributions — are still scheduled, because those are the things that quietly stop. This month: request a current statement and a list of holdings, and confirm your beneficiary designations are as you intended. When you are ready, and not before: decide whether the assigned adviser is the one you want. Nothing forces that decision on a timetable.
If you decide to move, or to look
Verify whoever is now on your account the same way you would verify a stranger, because that is what they are: how to read a background check and how to confirm fiduciary status in writing. If you move, the mechanics are ordinary and the new firm does the work — how a transfer runs. If the estate rather than the account is the live question, the account’s own registration and beneficiary designations control, not the adviser. A closely related situation with different steps: an adviser who is retiring and has named a successor.
There is no deadline on this decision.
When you are ready to look at alternatives — and only then — the matching service below introduces you to advisers who pay to meet you.
Before you start, what actually happens. The form is run by Kapitalwise, our advisor-matching partner. It asks about nine questions — age, investable assets, location — then your name, email and phone number, and verifies the phone by text.
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