Say your advisor sells a large stock position in December to rebalance your portfolio. For the portfolio, it’s a good call. Your CPA first hears about it in April, in a year you also earned more than usual. By then the timing is set, and so is most of the tax on it.
Both of them did their job well. No one looked at the two decisions together while there was still time to change them.
You might have a CPA, an attorney, and an advisor, and each of them may be very good. So who checks that their advice fits together?
For a lot of people, I suspect the honest answer is that they assumed one of them did. I understand why. When you pay three good professionals, it feels as if the whole thing must be covered somewhere.
Each piece of advice can be right on its own
Each professional answers the question in front of them. The CPA looks at your taxes. The attorney looks at what happens to your money and property if you die or can’t decide for yourself. The advisor looks at the portfolio they manage.
That’s how the work is set up, and there’s a good reason for it. Each one is trained and paid for their own piece.
Fitting together is a separate question. It asks whether a move that’s right for one piece causes a problem in another. That question isn’t always written into any one person’s engagement letter, so it can end up belonging to no one. The December sale at the top is one example.
Here’s another. Say you update your will after a change in the family. The attorney does careful work. But a retirement account or a life insurance policy usually goes to whoever is named on its beneficiary form, and that form may have been filled out years ago. The attorney may never have seen it.
Good professionals can each be right and still add up to advice that doesn’t fit. The gap is easy to miss, because each piece looks fine when you look at it alone.
What a wealth manager told me about the gap
I asked to meet with a wealth manager I know through a mutual network. He works with clients at the higher end.
He told me about a gap he’s seen in his industry. Not every advisor operates this way, and he wasn’t suggesting it’s common. But some advisors focus almost entirely on the money they manage. They don’t give clients much help with questions outside the portfolio.
In his view, clients worth single-digit or low double-digit millions often don’t receive the kind of service that families with much more wealth receive. That range is close to the reader I write for.
The part I kept thinking about was something else he said. People often don’t know what to ask their CPA, financial advisor, or attorney, because those professionals aren’t necessarily talking to each other. So there can be a gap between what a family has and what the family needs.
Plenty of good advisors do look at the whole picture, and he says that’s his approach. His point, as I understood it, is that a client can have three good professionals and still not know which questions to carry from one office to the next.
How many people give advice to one household
The numbers suggest this setup is common, though they’re rough. EY surveyed about 3,600 wealthy clients around the world at the end of 2024. On average, they used 2.3 wealth management firms. In the US, the average was lower, 1.7.
That count only includes firms that manage money. It leaves out the CPA, the attorney, and the insurance agent. So the number of people giving advice to one US household is probably higher than 1.7.
EY’s own researchers named the problem. Tax planning and financial planning, they wrote, are often delivered separately, with little collaboration between the people doing each. In their words, that “places the burden on clients to bridge communication gaps.”
A second survey, Capgemini’s World Wealth Report from this June, asked the firms themselves. Six in ten wealth management executives said their own firm lacks a unified view of the client. That’s inside a single firm, before anyone tries to line it up with a CPA across town. And nearly all of the firms, 97%, still sort their clients mainly by how much money they manage. That fits what the wealth manager told me, that service tends to follow the size of the account.
Two cautions are worth keeping. Capgemini sells technology and consulting to firms like these, so it has a reason to find gaps it can help close. And in the EY survey, 80% of clients said their main provider helps them see a clear picture of their overall finances. Maybe most of them are right. It’s also possible that a clear picture of what one firm can see feels like the whole picture.
The one job no one was hired for
I’ve met with a number of family office owners. A family office is a private team that a very wealthy family hires to look after its money and affairs.
Many family offices have one person who coordinates all the professionals and helps the family take each decision to the right place. The CPA still does the taxes, and the attorney still writes the will. That one person’s job is to check that it all fits together.
Families with a family office pay for that seat. Most households I write for don’t have one, and many probably don’t need one. But the job doesn’t go away when no one is hired to do it. It usually falls to the person who signs everything, often without anyone saying so.
And that person is rarely trained for it. They see each statement on its own, the same way each professional does, just with more statements to look at.
I’m listening to a book called What Would the Rockefellers Do? In it, the author says his attorney and his CPA didn’t agree, and he paid more tax on his return because of it. Both of them may have been good at their jobs. The cost of the disagreement still landed on him.
Someone I spoke with recently runs a business and earns very well. They told me they haven’t had a chance to look at the whole picture for their family. Earning more doesn’t seem to buy that view on its own.
There’s an honest limit here, too. If most of your money sits in one account and one tax return, the pieces may already fit, and this may not be your problem yet. Coordination also has a cost: more meetings, sometimes more fees, and one more opinion in the room.
Four questions to test who sees the whole picture
If you want to test your own setup, these are the questions I’d start with. None of them can be answered from one professional’s statement or report, and that’s the point.
Which money decision this year touched more than one of your professionals, and did each of them know about the other’s part before it was done? A sale, a gift to a grown child, or a move to another state can land on three desks at once.
Does each of your professionals know the others exist, by name? People who have never heard of each other can’t compare notes.
When did one of them last change their advice because of something another one did? If the answer is never, the advice may still be fine. It may also mean no one has looked.
If two of them disagreed, how would you find out? Often the first place a disagreement shows up is in a decision that’s already been made.
If most of your answers are “I’m not sure,” that’s the gap worth investigating. You don’t yet know who’s checking that the advice fits. It may be one of your professionals.
At the start, I said many people assume one of their professionals is checking. It may be worth finding out whether any of the professionals assume the same thing about you.
So here’s what I’d like to know about the last big money decision you made: who saw all of it, besides you?
Reply and tell me, even in one line.
If someone came to mind while you were reading this, send it to them.
This is not financial advice. This material is for educational purposes only and not financial, legal, or investment advice. Private investments may be risky. Do your own research and consult licensed professionals before acting on anything specific to your situation.
Until Monday.
Alina
One more thing. Besides this letter, I offer to help a few households see who holds what in their financial life, before it all depends on one person. I call it The Household Map. If that sounds like your house, here's how it works. I'll tell you honestly whether it fits.
