Clear Money Guide
What this guide covers
A quick view of the questions and evidence developed below.
Updated July 31, 2026. Quick answer: do the ratio before anything else. In our own benchmark of published adviser fee schedules the weighted median cost of percentage-of-assets management at $1 million is $8,750 to $10,000 a year. If you are drawing roughly 4% — about $40,000 — then the fee is on the order of a fifth to a quarter of your annual withdrawal. That framing is uncomfortable and it is the correct one: in retirement the fee competes with your spending, not with your returns. It can still be worth paying. It has to earn it explicitly.
Measure the fee against your withdrawal, not against your balance.
Ask each adviser what they would do in the conversion window and how they would sequence withdrawals. The service below matches you with 2 to 3 advisors so you can compare the answers.
If your portfolio is $250,000 or more, this connects you — free, with no obligation to hire anyone — with 2 to 3 vetted advisors.
Before you start, what actually happens. The matching service is run by WiserAdvisor, an independent advisor-matching company. It opens on their site, asks for your ZIP code and a few questions, and matches you with 2 to 3 vetted advisors. It is free to you.
WiserAdvisor states the service is built for portfolios of $250,000 and above. By submitting, you consent to emails, phone calls and text messages from WiserAdvisor and up to three advisors, so expect to be contacted. Clear Money Guide is paid when you complete the form, whether or not you ever hire anyone.
Compare fees, scope, conflicts, credentials and fiduciary duty before you hire anyone. This is not the only way to find an adviser.
Opens on WiserAdvisor’s site in a new tab.
When it pays for itself
Multi-account tax sequencing. A $1 million retirement usually spans traditional, Roth and taxable accounts, and the order you draw them down changes lifetime tax by amounts that dwarf the fee — the withdrawal-order calculator. The conversion window. The years between retiring and required distributions are the lowest-bracket years you will have; used well they permanently reduce future required distributions, and they expire. Social Security coordination for a couple, where two claiming decisions interact with survivor benefits — the claiming-age calculator. A spouse who does not manage the money. A real and underrated reason to have a relationship in place. Behaviour in the first bad market of retirement, where selling into a decline while withdrawing does damage that does not come back.
When it does not
If the money is essentially one traditional IRA and a pension or Social Security covering most of your spending, if you have already set the withdrawal order and the claiming date, and if you held your allocation through the last decline, then $9,000 a year is buying reassurance rather than decisions. Reassurance has value — just price it honestly against hourly advice at a few hours a year, or a fixed-fee retirement-income engagement repeated every few years. And compare models on arithmetic rather than instinct: the break-even calculator, whether 1% is worth it, and what a $1 million portfolio costs to have managed.
The middle almost nobody is offered
You are rarely presented with the option of paying for the plan and managing the money yourself, because it is not how most firms are compensated. It exists: a flat-fee or advice-only engagement that produces the withdrawal sequence, the conversion schedule and the claiming decision, refreshed periodically, with a three-fund portfolio doing the investing. At $1 million that can cost a fifth of the ongoing percentage. Flat-fee fiduciary advisers, which model fits, and if you already have an adviser, a second-opinion review of the plan you are on.
Neighbouring questions
Retiring with $500,000 · $1 million while still working · wealth management at $2 million · the ladder by service tier.