We get the question often enough that it deserves a real answer: “Will you do a one-time project, or bill me by the hour?”
We don’t, and not because there’s anything wrong with advisors who do. The honest reason is that we’ve built Walkner Condon around a particular kind of client and a particular kind of work, and a transactional engagement doesn’t fit either one. We’d rather explain that openly than pretend our way is the only sensible way to do this. It isn’t. So here’s how we think about it.
When Hourly Financial Advice Makes Sense
If you’ve spent any time on the personal finance corners of the internet (aka Reddit), you’ve seen the consensus: buy low-cost index funds, keep your costs down, and if you want advice, pay a flat fee or by the hour rather than a percentage of your assets. Pay $50,000 a year on a $5 million portfolio? The forums will tell you that’s a lot of money for what can look, in a quiet year, like not very much work.
For a lot of people, that advice is genuinely good. If you’re early in your career, earning a solid W-2, building wealth in a 401(k), and your financial life fits on an index card, you may not need an ongoing relationship with a firm like ours at all. A subscription planner or an hourly engagement could serve you well, and we’ll happily say so. We’ve told prospects exactly that.
We don’t think the critique is unfounded. We think it’s calibrated to a situation that isn’t the one most of our clients are in.
Why Complex Wealth Requires Ongoing Management
In our view, the advice that works beautifully for a straightforward financial life starts to strain when the situation gets complex. Complexity tends to arrive alongside wealth, not in a tidy line after it.
Concentrated stock from a long career or a company sale. RSUs and stock options vesting on a schedule that collides with your tax bracket. Income across multiple states, or K-1s from a business or partnership. A property or a company you’re preparing to sell. Estate documents and trusts that need to keep pace with changing laws and a changing family. Charitable giving you’d like to do in the most tax-aware way. Private or alternative investments that need real due diligence, not a quick glance.
None of these are “one and done”. They interact with each other, they change as the rules and your life change, and getting them wrong is expensive. A higher-net-worth financial life isn’t a simple plan with a bigger number on it. It’s a different problem. The work we do is the ongoing management of that problem.
This isn’t only our experience talking. Kitces Research, one of the most widely cited independent studies of how financial advisors actually work, found that more affluent households “tend to have specific needs that require more complex planning,” and that the time an advisory team spends on a client grows along with that complexity. Most tellingly, the gap shows up between meetings, on the ongoing work: the hours a team devotes to an established relationship each year rise from roughly 15 to 16 for the simplest clients to nearly 30 for the most involved ones. As firms take on more complex households, they also serve far fewer of them; typically fewer than 50 per advisor for clients with $3 million or more in assets, versus 100 or more for a client around $500,000. The data line up with what the work feels like: more complexity means more ongoing attention, not the same plan at a higher price.
The Real Value of an Ongoing Financial Relationship
Here’s the part the hourly vs. percentage debate tends to miss. A lot of the value an advisor adds isn’t a document you receive once. It shows up over time, and often at the least convenient moments.
Tax-aware rebalancing and deciding which assets belong in which type of account. Multi-year Roth conversion strategy. Harvesting losses and managing gains against an income picture that keeps moving. Coordinating with your CPA and your estate attorney as facts change. And, maybe most underrated, being the steady voice when markets fall and every instinct is telling you to sell.
That last one matters more than people expect. Industry research has tried for years to put a number on what advisors add, and across studies from firms like Vanguard, Morningstar, and Russell Investments, the single largest contributor tends to be behavioral: helping people stay invested and avoid costly, emotion-driven mistakes. (These are industry estimates about advice in general, not a promise of any particular result, and not a projection of how any one client will do.)
But think about when that value gets delivered. It’s during the scary stretch, when the market is down and the headlines are loud. In our view, an ongoing relationship is the thing that makes that steadying conversation happen at all. A one-time project, by design, can’t. Many advisors and clients haven’t even been through a meaningful down market – were you around to experience the 2008 crash or dot com bubble? Surviving such volatility leaves you with the perspective and experience needed to truly value risk management and asset allocation, unlike those who have only known the (nearly) consistent upward trajectory of the stock market of the most recent decade.
It’s worth seeing what “ongoing” actually looks like in practice. The same Kitces research found that the typical advisor stays in contact with each client through roughly 16 touchpoints a year: meetings, reviews, calls, and check-ins. The relationship, in other words, is the product. And because a firm like ours bundles comprehensive planning into that ongoing fee rather than charging for investment management alone, the engagement covers the whole financial picture, not just the portfolio.
Addressing the Fee-Only Fiduciary Conflict of Interest
There’s a fair criticism of the “AUM model” that we won’t dodge: when our fee is tied to the assets we manage, advice that reduces those assets such as paying off a mortgage, buying real estate, or making a large charitable gift runs against our own fee interest. That tension is real.
The way we handle it is the way a fee-only fiduciary is supposed to: the advice follows your plan, not our fee, and we’re glad to talk through exactly how we approach decisions that move money off the table. We’d rather you hear us say that plainly than discover the tension on your own.
Who We’re Built For: Wealth Management for Complex Lives
We’re a fee-only fiduciary firm built for households with real complexity who want someone managing the whole picture on an ongoing basis. We help with investments, taxes, and planning, with a team you can actually reach in the way you prefer to interact. That’s the work an ongoing relationship is designed to do, and it’s why we price it the way we do rather than by the project.
If that’s the kind of help you’re looking for, we’d welcome a conversation. And if a one-time project or an hourly engagement is genuinely the better fit for where you are right now, we’ll tell you that too. Comfortably Unique™ cuts both ways: part of being a good fit is being honest about when we aren’t one.
Sources. Industry findings cited above are drawn from Kitces Research: The Kitces Report — How Financial Planners Actually Develop, Deliver, And Maintain Financial Plans (Vol. 2, 2024), for client complexity and team time per client (Figure 3.7 and Key Findings) and ongoing client touchpoints (Figure 4.23–4.24); and The Kitces Report, What Actually Contributes To Advisor Wellbeing (Vol. 2, 2025), for the investments-only versus planning-bundled distinction. Behavioral value-of-advice references are to Vanguard, Morningstar, and Russell Investments studies.
