Nobody calls anyone for a family. That gap is the whole reason I do this work, and the reason everything on this site is free.
My father, Michael, spent his career as a consultant. Companies brought him in when something wasn't working and they couldn't see why. He'd go in, find the actual problem — usually not the one they'd called about — and fix it.
I grew up around that. And what stuck with me wasn't the businesses. It was the method: the diagnosis matters more than the solution, and the thing people ask you about is rarely the thing that's actually wrong.
Here's what I noticed later. A company with a problem has someone to call. A family doesn't.
Institutions get people whose entire job is to look at the whole picture and tell them the truth about it. Households — the people who spent forty years building something and now have to make it last — get sold products. Nobody's job is to look at the whole thing and say what's actually wrong.
That's the gap. My father built Alston Financial Services doing that work for institutions. I do it for the households nobody was doing it for.
Retirement distribution planning. Not accumulation — you've already done that part, and you did it well. This is the other half: turning what you built into income that lasts, without handing more of it to the IRS than you have to.
It's a genuinely different discipline, and most of the industry is still built for the first one. I know that firsthand — I started at one of the big firms everyone has heard of, and what I found was a business built on being a middleman. Cookie-cutter portfolios, plenty of activity, very little actual planning. It works fine while people are saving. It falls apart the moment somebody needs to know which account to draw from first.
So I moved to a firm that put tax planning, estate work, and portfolio management under one roof, and that's the work I've done since.
Twelve briefings, twelve tools, a monthly call — no charge, no account, no email required to use any of it. I'd rather be useful to a hundred people and work with a few of them than gate everything and be useful to nobody. If the material stands on its own, some of you will want help with your specific numbers. That's the whole model.
A first conversation is thirty to forty-five minutes on Zoom, and it's mostly you talking. I want to understand what you're trying to accomplish and what the money is actually for. My goal in that call is that you leave pointed in the right direction — whether or not we ever work together.
If we go further, it's a discovery meeting, then data gathering, then a written plan, then a conversation about implementing it. Usually one to three meetings. You'll see the arithmetic, not just conclusions.
I'd rather you hear this from me than wonder about it.
On assets I manage, a fee based on the amount — billed quarterly, disclosed up front.
On certain products, annuities and bank products among them, a commission paid by the company rather than out of your money.
That second one is worth being direct about, because it's a real conflict and pretending otherwise would be insulting. It's why the March briefing on this site tells you plainly that delaying Social Security beats anything I could sell you, and why the August briefing says the Roth conversion window is the most oversold idea in retirement planning. Read those and decide for yourself whether I'm giving you straight answers.
Based in East Texas, working with households across roughly fifteen states. Nearly all of it happens over Zoom, which suits most people better anyway.
The tools here are the same ones I use. What they can't do is tell you which of the twelve matters most for your situation. That part's a conversation.
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