Clear Money Guide
What this guide covers
A quick view of the questions and evidence developed below.
Guides › Is an Advisor Worth It
Updated July 31, 2026. Quick answer: it depends on whether the five decisions below are already settled. What changes once you are retired is the denominator: the fee no longer competes with your returns, it competes with your spending. In our benchmark of published adviser fee schedules, the weighted median annual cost is $3,750 to $5,000 at $500,000 and $8,750 to $10,000 at $1 million — against a 4% withdrawal that is roughly a fifth to a quarter of the income the portfolio produces. It can absolutely be worth it. It has to be worth it for something specific, and there are five somethings.
Ask which of the five your fee bought this year.
If the answer is thin, meeting one alternative costs an hour. 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. Kapitalwise sends your details to advisers who pay for the introduction, so expect calls and texts. Clear Money Guide is paid when you submit the form, whether or not you ever hire anyone. This is free to you and there is no obligation to hire anyone.
The Kapitalwise form opens here — you stay on this page.
What happens when you press the button
It asks about nine questions — age, investable assets, location — then your name, email and phone number, and verifies the phone by text. Nothing loads and nothing reaches Kapitalwise until you press the button.
The five
1. Withdrawal order. Which account funds each year of spending, and in what proportion. This is the single largest recurring lever in retirement and it is invisible from a statement — the withdrawal-order calculator. 2. Social Security claiming. One irreversible decision, worth a great deal over a long retirement, and interacting with a spouse’s claim and survivor benefits — the claiming-age calculator, 62 versus 70. 3. The Roth conversion window. The low-bracket years between retiring and required distributions are the best conversion opportunity most people ever get, and they close permanently. 4. Bracket and premium thresholds. Income in retirement is partly a choice, and choices have cliffs — Medicare premium tiers and the taxation of Social Security both step rather than slope. 5. Sequence-of-returns risk. Withdrawing into an early decline does permanent damage; the mitigations are structural and worth having decided in advance.
What is NOT on the list
Investment selection, market forecasting, and quarterly performance reviews. If those are the substance of what your fee buys, you are paying retirement prices for accumulation-era service. The test is direct: ask which of the five above your adviser has done in writing in the past year. A good adviser will have a document for each. If you cannot get a straight answer, a second-opinion review costs a fraction of one year’s fee and settles it.
Buying the five without buying a percentage
All five are decisions, and decisions can be bought by the project and refreshed every few years as circumstances change. That is the option almost nobody is offered, because it is not how most firms are paid: advice-only planning, fixed-fee project work, hourly. The counter-argument for an ongoing relationship is real and worth naming honestly: someone answers the phone in a bad market, and a spouse who does not manage the money has a relationship already in place. Price that deliberately rather than by default — the break-even calculator and the model decision aid.
If you are not retired yet
The size-framed versions of this decision, at the retirement date rather than after it: retiring with $500,000 and with $1 million. The general break-even: is a financial advisor worth it.
Put a number on the fee first. In retirement the fee competes with your spending, so the annual dollar figure is the one that matters: check your own fee against this data.
The question underneath all of these: can I retire? — answered as a gap in dollars a year and in working years, on assumptions you set and can see.