the problem is that the type of advisors you are talking about only care about selling products and making commissions, they actually don't care about helping people make the right decisions.
the same goes for CPAs - the moment they see that your tax situation becomes too complicated or a potential liability or they can't make a good profit (read: cookie cutter tax situation which can be handled by fresh grads but can be invoiced at partner rate) they tell you to go elsewhere.
I work with a local independent advisor, and while they do make money on commissions they've never advised me to go a direction that doesn't work just to buy a product, and their advice is worth every penny in fees that I pay on the money they manage (which is not most of my retirement dollars, just a small chunk, per their advice to keep it in low-fee funds.) In general I'd say find somebody you trust. Try to work local if you can.
Anyway, my advisor works via a larger "network" company that provides their white-label tools to run monte carlo sims, etc and game out retirement. None of them are this accessible / slick. Definitely something to this.
Any thoughts on the path you might take to approach that? As a solo dev building this as a side project currently, I don't exactly have a huge existing network of connections in the advisory space.
I've heard of fee-only financial advisors. They don't make commissions or skim percentage points off your portfolio, so their incentives should be more directly aligned to yours.
Any data yet on how that model tends to play out over the long-run in the average case? Off the cuff it does sound like incentives could be better aligned though.
the same goes for CPAs - the moment they see that your tax situation becomes too complicated or a potential liability or they can't make a good profit (read: cookie cutter tax situation which can be handled by fresh grads but can be invoiced at partner rate) they tell you to go elsewhere.