Excellent help at an excellent price.
I was a DIY personal finance guy for decades, following a 'Bogleheads' type of approach, at least in principle. I naively thought that financial decisions would get easier around retirement time, kids through college, etc. I was very wrong about that.
After much research and talking with a bunch of firms, including the big, low-cost Usual Suspects, we decided to try working with Abundo Wealth a little over a year ago. It's a low risk decision to try them out: they follow a low-cost, advice-only model for their services. So if you don't like it, you drop it. It's literally that simple.
As it happened, we were not happy with our first advisor at Abundo, though we could see that the model had great promise. We said that we wanted to try someone else - see if it worked better. The founder reached out to get the details on the issues we had experienced and was great and supportive about helping with a switch. He recommended we try working with Olivia, one of their financial planners.
To put it simply, Olivia is fantastic. And Abundo suits our needs right now very, very well. We now have truly responsive, buttoned up, expert advice and guidance on the complete array of financial questions and doubts that I had before we joined up with Abundo. And Abundo's investment philosophy, in my experience, is squarely in line with the Boglehead approach (low cost, index-fund driven, simple, diversified, ride-out the dips, etc). I love that they never take "possession" of our assets - they just give us great advice about what we should do with them. Heck, if you're not certain how to implement something that Abundo has suggested, they'll even jump on line with you while you're in your brokerage's web site and walk you through, screen by screen. It gives you a safety net if things get tricky to figure out.
And let's say I want to manage our finances some other way next month: I just cancel with Abundo and go my merry way. Nothing to liquidate, nothing to transfer. All of our assets have been in our hands all along. Abundo charges its very inexpensive fee on a monthly basis, like paying for most typical services. All of this make it a great model for folks that feel reasonably comfortable doing financial transactions but find themselves having important questions they'd like expert advice on.
All that said, I would love to see Abundo offer a second tier of service someday, where we could authorize them to directly do the (infrequent) trading on our behalf, should we wish to do that. That would take care of those of us who are uncomfortable-with or uninterested-in learning how to work the gears of financial institutions.