Answers · 401(k) Rollover

How much should you pay for retirement planning?

A one time written retirement plan usually runs about 2,000 to 5,000 dollars. Hourly planners charge roughly 200 to 500 an hour, and subscription planning runs about 100 to 400 a month. A free plan is not free, because its cost sits inside whatever product gets placed at the end. Price the advice against the decision it governs, not against your savings balance.

Almost nobody prints the price, so here it is.

Retirement planning gets sold four ways and only one of them has anything like a public price list, which is why the question keeps going unanswered. The figures below are illustrative. They move with the region, with how complicated your household is, and with who is doing the work.

A one time written plan from a flat fee planner usually lands somewhere between 2,000 and 5,000 dollars. Households carrying a business, a rental property, or equity compensation routinely pay past 7,500.

Hourly planners charge roughly 200 to 500 an hour, and a full retirement plan tends to be six to fifteen hours of work. So the hourly route and the flat fee route often arrive at a similar total. The real difference is that hourly lets you buy one decision instead of all of them.

Subscription planning runs about 100 to 400 a month, normally a plan in the first year and continued access after that. Charging a percentage of your savings is the fourth way. We took that one apart on the page about whether 200,000 is enough to work with an advisor, so we will not go over it again here.

The free plan is the most expensive one on the list, and that includes ours.

A complimentary retirement analysis is not charity and it is not a loss leader. The work behind it is real and somebody pays for it. The cost just gets moved to the end, where it sits inside whatever is placed after you say yes.

We should say our own version out loud. opfinances.com is a licensed insurance agency. We are not a financial advisor and we are not a fiduciary. We do not charge for analysis, because we are paid a commission by the insurance company when a contract is placed, and any guarantees inside such a contract depend on the claims paying ability of the issuing insurer. Our analysis is free the same way a test drive is free.

None of that is an argument against taking a free plan. It is an argument for knowing which question the document was built to answer. A free plan answers what you should buy. A paid plan is able to answer what you should do, and it is allowed to conclude that the answer is nothing.

So ask whether this plan can end in a recommendation that pays the person who wrote it nothing at all. Then ask whether it ever has.

Price the deliverable, not the meeting.

You are not buying somebody's time. You are buying a document. So ask what will be inside it before you agree to a number, because at a few thousand dollars a retirement plan should contain all of the following.

A year by year cash flow that runs to age 95, rather than one headline number. A claiming analysis built on your actual earnings record. A drawdown order across your pre tax, Roth and taxable accounts with the tax bill shown for each year, not just the balances.

Named Roth conversion windows in the specific years between the day you stop working and the day required minimum distributions start. A Medicare check that accounts for the two year income lookback. A survivor version of the whole plan, run with one of you gone. And a beneficiary audit on every account, which is the cheapest item in the document and the one most often wrong.

If what arrives is a stack of probability charts and a risk questionnaire with your name on the cover, you did not buy a plan. You bought a brochure.

Compare the fee to the decision, not to your balance.

Most people judge the price against their savings, and that is the wrong denominator. Judge it against the decision the plan exists to get right, because a handful of those decisions are worth many times the fee.

Moving a Social Security claim from 62 to 70 is worth roughly 736 dollars a month on the earnings record worked through on our page about a 25,000 dollar wage. A pension election becomes permanent the day you sign it. Drawdown order on a large pre tax balance changes the tax bill on identical spending, which is the whole argument on the page about 2 million at 67.

Set against any one of those, 3,000 dollars paid once is a small number. We will say so plainly even though it points you toward somebody we are not, because the alternative is pretending that the only thing worth paying for is a product.

The same arithmetic runs the other way. A fee charged every year for a decision that gets made once is poor value no matter how modest the percentage sounds.

You are allowed to buy one hour instead of one plan.

Comprehensive planning is what the industry pushes hardest, and part of the reason is that it renews. Plenty of people do not need it. They need one decision priced properly.

If the live question is when to claim, or whether to take the pension as a lump sum or as monthly income, or what to do with one old employer plan, an hourly planner will sell you three hours on exactly that. Three hours at 300 is 900 dollars, and it is a complete answer to the thing actually keeping you up.

Then you can come to us, or to anybody else, with that analysis already done and independent of whoever wants the sale. That is a better conversation for you and an honest one for us. It is the version we would want if the money were ours.

Related

Is paying for a retirement plan worth it?

It depends entirely on what decision is in front of you. If you are weighing a claiming age, a pension election, or the order you draw accounts down in, a few thousand dollars paid once is small against decisions worth far more than that. If your situation is one account and a fixed budget, an hour of somebody's time may be the whole job.

How much does a flat fee planner charge for a retirement plan?

Commonly 2,000 to 5,000 dollars for a written plan, and past 7,500 where there is a business, rental property, or equity compensation involved. These are illustrative ranges rather than quotes, and they move with region and complexity. Ask for the number and the deliverable in the same sentence before you agree to anything.

Why do some people offer a retirement plan for free?

Because the cost is recovered at the end, inside whatever product gets placed. That includes us. opfinances.com is a licensed insurance agency, we are not a financial advisor and not a fiduciary, and we are paid a commission by the insurance company rather than by you. A free plan is worth having, as long as you know which question it was built to answer.

Can I pay for retirement advice by the hour?

Yes. Hourly planners generally charge 200 to 500 an hour and will take a single question rather than requiring a full engagement. It is the cheapest honest way to get one decision answered by somebody with no stake in the answer, and most people asking about price are really trying to solve one decision.

Do I have to keep paying once the plan is written?

Not with a flat fee or hourly planner. Subscription and percentage of assets models both renew by design, so ask what year two costs and what is in it that was not in year one. A rebalance and a phone call is a different product from a plan rebuilt against your current numbers.

Where this fits.

This question sits inside a bigger one. 401(k) Rollover walks through the whole decision rather than this one piece of it.

On Point Finances is a licensed insurance agency, not a tax, legal, or investment adviser. This page is general education, not a recommendation, and reading it does not create a client relationship.

Start with a conversation