A few of the questions people ask most often before working with us. If yours isn’t here, that’s a good place to start a first conversation.
What does InnoSight actually do?
We build retirement plans for people moving from saving to spending. That means three things working together: where your income comes from, how taxes shape what you keep, and how the plan holds up when the market or your life does something you didn’t plan for. Most clients come to us with a pile of accounts and no plan connecting them. We connect them.
Who do you work best with?
People in the ten or fifteen years around retirement who have done well, have real money to manage, and want a thinking partner, not a salesperson. Many are business owners, executives, and professionals whose situation got complicated faster than their plan did. If you want someone to hand you “the best product,” we’re probably not the fit. We diagnose before we prescribe.
How are you different from a traditional advisor?
Most advisors manage your investments and stop there. The part that quietly decides your retirement, the taxes and the timing of when you draw from which account, falls in the gap between your advisor and your CPA. Your CPA files what already happened. Your advisor watches the portfolio. Nobody plans the part in the middle. That middle is where we live.
Why might I need a different advisor for retirement than the one who helped me build my savings?
There are really two jobs in a financial life, and they’re almost opposites. One is building the pile. The other is turning that pile into income that lasts the rest of your life, without running out and without handing too much to the IRS. The advisor who helped you save may be excellent at the first job. That doesn’t make them the right fit for the second, and it’s no knock on them.
Growing money rewards staying invested and riding out the dips. Living off money is a different sport: the order you withdraw from your accounts, the tax bracket you land in each year, Roth conversion windows, Social Security timing, Medicare premiums, and the sequence of returns in your first decade. Different strategies, different tax rules, and a genuinely different mindset. A good generalist knows a little of both. Almost no one is an expert in both at once.
So the natural handoff point is retirement itself. The skills that got you here are not the same skills that get you through. That last part is the work we focus on, and it’s most of what we do.
Why do you talk about taxes so much?
For most retirees it’s the largest controllable expense left, and almost nobody plans it forward. The order you draw from your accounts, the years you convert, the income you show on a return: these move what you keep, your Medicare premiums, and how long your money lasts. You can’t change the market. Here you have real control.
Do I have to move all my money to you?
No. The first conversation isn’t about moving anything. It’s about whether your plan has a gap worth fixing. Often the most useful thing we do in an hour is show you something no one has shown you yet, and a lot of the time the answer isn’t anything we sell.
What happens in a first conversation?
Thirty minutes. We look at one thing: where your retirement income would actually come from, or the blind spot most likely to cost you. No products, no pitch. You bring one question that’s on your mind, and we start there.