Finally.Financial Advice Built Around Your Real Estate Too.

I am a fee-only financial planner, which means my compensation for financial planning comes directly from the fees you pay me, not from investment products, asset management fees, or any percentage of the money you have invested. I do not manage investment accounts, which means I have no financial incentive tied to where your money is held or how it is allocated.

That structure eliminates the conflicts of interest that can arise when an advisor's compensation is tied to what they recommend or how much money they oversee. When I make a recommendation, it is because I believe it is the right recommendation for your financial plan, not because it benefits me.

My fees are based on the scope of your situation and the work involved, not on how much money you have invested. That means my compensation doesn't change based on whether your portfolio goes up or down, and I have no financial incentive to recommend that you move assets under my management.

For most comprehensive financial plans, fees range from $8,000 to $14,000. In a limited number of cases involving extraordinary complexity, work may be billed hourly.

For a fuller explanation of how fees are structured, what's included, and a way to think about the value of the fee relative to what's at stake in your financial plan, see the Fees section of the FAQ.

Many financial planning practices are built around investment portfolios. This practice is built around the recognition that for some families, directly held real estate represents an enormous and often underplanned part of their wealth.

I analyze investment real estate as part of the comprehensive financial plan: evaluating its actual performance, integrating it with retirement planning, taxes, and investment strategy, and helping clients make informed decisions about whether to keep, sell, refinance, or exchange properties.

I also teach Real Estate Investments for Financial Planners through UC Berkeley Extension, a course designed for financial professionals who want to understand how to analyze investment real estate alongside a client's broader financial life.

Traditional financial planning tools are designed around investment portfolios. A rental property doesn't arrive with a ticker symbol or a standardized statement. It has to be analyzed: its income, expenses, cash flow, debt, depreciation, return on equity, tax exposure, management demands, and available alternatives.

That analysis then needs to be integrated into the rest of the financial plan, not evaluated separately from it. A property may look reasonable on its own and could still represent a problem at the household level: too much concentration in real estate, insufficient liquidity, a weak return on the equity currently committed to it, or capital that could accomplish more elsewhere.

The opposite can also be true. That's why we feel strongly that real estate belongs inside the financial plan, not beside it.

I call it The 5% Real Estate Performance Gap®, the potential spread between the performance an owner believes a property is producing and what a disciplined review of the numbers actually shows. That gap tends to come from optimistic assumptions, costs that are tracked inconsistently or not at all, and the absence of systematic performance measurement.

Our work has shown that a few percentage points can sound manageable until you apply them to the equity tied up in the property and consider the effect over years.

One of the most frequently overlooked measures we have seen is return on your current equity. You may not be deciding what to do with the $150,000 you invested years ago. You may be deciding what to do with $900,000 of equity tied up in that property today. That's a very different question, and the right starting point for evaluating what the property should be doing for you now.

We analyze what the property is actually doing today, including its income, expenses, debt, equity, tax characteristics, and the return you're earning on the capital currently invested in it. Then we compare what we believe are realistic alternatives: continuing to own it, improving its operations, restructuring the debt, selling outright, completing a 1031 exchange, or redeploying the equity elsewhere.

Each alternative can be modeled against your overall financial plan so you can see the potential effect on cash flow, taxes, retirement income, liquidity, and long-term wealth, not just the property in isolation.

This is core to how The Real Estate Income Lab® works: bringing the art of understanding what you're trying to accomplish together with the science of what the numbers actually show.

We have seen that rental income can be a meaningful source of retirement cash flow, but it behaves differently from a dividend or a Social Security payment. It varies with vacancy, expenses, and market conditions. It comes with tax implications, including depreciation while you own the property and potential recapture when you sell. And it's tied to an asset that requires management, carries liability, and may need future capital.

Real estate equity, meanwhile, could very well represent wealth that often isn't captured in traditional retirement projections. A client with $1.5 million in investment accounts and $2 million of equity in rental properties has a very different retirement picture, but only if the plan accounts for all of it.

We integrate both into the comprehensive financial plan: modeling rental income alongside Social Security, investment distributions, and other sources; evaluating how the real estate performs as a long-term income asset; and helping determine how, and when, it makes sense to hold, transition, or sell real estate holdings as you move through and into retirement.