PeakWorth™ vs a Financial Advisor — When Software Wins, When a Human Does

What a good financial advisor actually does well

A genuinely good fee-only fiduciary CFP earns their fee on situations the software can't reason about: concentrated single-stock positions with vesting cliffs, business sales, blended-family estate planning, special-needs trusts, divorce settlements, the year before retirement decumulation begins, and any moment where the wrong move costs more than years of fees. They also provide behavioral coaching in a 40% drawdown — for many people, the call that stops them from selling at the bottom is worth the entire relationship.

If that describes your situation, hire one. Look for fee-only (no commissions), fiduciary (legally obligated to act in your interest), and CFP-credentialed. NAPFA and XY Planning Network are good directories. Many good advisors are flat-fee or hourly rather than AUM.

Where the AUM advisor model falls short for most households

The standard pitch — “hand us 1%/yr of your assets and we'll plan and manage your money” — was designed for a world where ongoing financial planning required a human on the phone. Today, the underlying math is software, and the “management” is mostly rebalancing index funds.

Meanwhile, the fee compounds against you in a way that's easy to underestimate. 1%/yr sounds small until you sit with the 30-year math.

• Most household plans are not actually complex — max the 401(k), HSA, IRA, hold index funds, time the big decisions
• AUM fees grow as your portfolio grows, even when the work doesn't
• Quarterly review cadence isn't fast enough for the decisions that actually matter (job change, home, baby)
• $250k–$500k account minimums lock out exactly the households who'd benefit most from planning

When using BOTH makes sense

The combination most of our power-users land on: a flat-fee fiduciary CFP for a one-time deep-dive every few years (or for a specific complex event), plus PeakWorth as the always-on plan in between. That stack tends to be cheaper, more current, and more honest than a percentage-of-assets relationship — and it puts the human time on the questions where humans add the most value.

The cost math over a lifetime

Take a household with $500k invested today, contributing $30k/yr, growing at 7% real. Over 30 years, a 1%/yr AUM fee subtracts roughly $700k–$1M of terminal wealth versus a flat-fee planning tool. That's not a typo. The fee comes out of the asset base every year, so you lose both the fee and all the future compounding on that fee.

A flat $119.88/yr (PeakWorth Navigator) doesn't scale with your wealth. A 1% fee on a portfolio that grows from $500k to $2M scales from $5,000/yr to $20,000/yr — for the same software-driven planning work.

How PeakWorth produces the dated FI Age an advisor charges 1% for

The core deliverable of a financial plan — the one an AUM advisor rebuilds at each quarterly review — is a projection of when your money lasts and when you can stop working. PeakWorth generates that on demand: it runs your real numbers through a year-by-year deterministic simulation to age 95, with federal + state taxes, account-ordering, Social Security, and inflation, and reports your FI Age — the year your portfolio reaches ~25× the expenses it must cover after Social Security — roughly 20× your total annual expenses.

Because it re-runs instantly, you get that dated year the day a decision comes up — a job change, a home, a bonus — rather than waiting for the next review. The 1%/yr fee mostly pays for work the simulation already does; the human is worth hiring for the complex edges, not for re-deriving the date.