Vanguard Personal Advisor Select charges no more than $30 per $10,000 invested each year and pairs you with a dedicated CFP professional at a $500,000 minimum, according to Vanguard's own advice comparison. That is genuinely low pricing for portfolio management, and for most households the portfolio is the easy part. The harder question, and the one this review is built around, is whether the tier you buy actually owns the decisions that move a retirement outcome: the order you draw down accounts, the years you convert to Roth, and the income figure that sets your Medicare premium two years later.
Provider pricing below is as published on each provider's own website on 25 July 2026. Fees and service tiers change without notice, so confirm current pricing and scope on the provider's page before acting on anything here.
What you are actually buying in a hybrid tier
A hybrid advice tier is an automated or model driven portfolio with a human attached. The portfolio side is close to a solved problem now. Low cost index exposure, automatic rebalancing, and disciplined allocation are widely available and cheap. Fee competition has pushed that piece toward the floor, which is why the drag a single percentage point of fee creates over a long retirement is less of a threat at these price points than it is under traditional pricing.
So the review question is not really whether the portfolio is any good. It is two other questions. First, do you get one named human who knows your file, or do you get whoever answers the phone that day. Second, does the scope include the coordination work: withdrawal sequencing, conversion timing, Medicare income thresholds, Social Security claiming, and the interaction between all four. Those are the decisions that compound. Working with a financial advisor is worth evaluating on that second question, not the first.
Vanguard: the clearest ladder of the four
Vanguard publishes four rungs, and the ladder is unusually legible. Vanguard's advice comparison lists Digital Advisor at approximately $15 to $16 per $10,000 invested with a $1,001 minimum, Personal Advisor at approximately $30 to $31 per $10,000 with a $50,000 minimum, Personal Advisor Select at no more than $30 per $10,000 with a $500,000 minimum, and Wealth Management above $5M.
The interesting detail is what changes between rungs. The price barely moves between Personal Advisor and Personal Advisor Select. What moves is the relationship. Vanguard describes the two lower rungs as access to an advisor, and only at Select does the description become a dedicated Certified Financial Planner professional. If you are in the $500K and up range, that distinction is close to the whole ballgame. An advisor who has to reread your file before every call is not going to run a multi year conversion plan.
On scope, Vanguard's Personal Advisor Select page does list the right things: tax minimization, Roth conversions, drawdowns and required distributions, Social Security optimization, and health care options. That is a broader stated scope than many tiers at this price. Stated scope and lived depth are different, though, and the way to test it is to ask what the plan is for the specific year you turn 73 or 75.
Schwab: two products, two completely different fee shapes
Schwab runs two things that sound similar and price nothing alike.
Schwab Intelligent Portfolios carries no advisory fee and no commissions, per Schwab's published fees and minimums page. That does not mean the service costs nothing. Schwab's own disclosure on the Intelligent Portfolios page explains the mechanism plainly: portfolios include a cash allocation held in FDIC insured deposit accounts at Schwab Bank, Schwab Bank earns income on those deposits, and it earns more the larger the cash allocation. The cost is levied through the cash rather than the statement. It is disclosed, and it is still worth understanding before you assume the invoice is the whole price.
Schwab Intelligent Portfolios Premium adds a one time planning fee of $300 and a monthly advisory fee of $30, again per Schwab's published fee page. That flat structure is the least sensitive to portfolio size of anything on this list, because the cost stops climbing as the balance grows. On a $500,000 portfolio, $360 a year works out to roughly 0.07 percent. Schwab's relationship based offering, Schwab Wealth Advisory, is priced separately and starts at 0.80% with rates that decrease at higher asset levels.
The tradeoff is what you would expect. Subscription pricing buys planning support wrapped around an automated portfolio. It does not typically buy the same discretionary attention that a percentage fee funds.
Fidelity: a coaching team at one end, a dedicated advisor at the other
Fidelity's ladder has the widest gap between rungs here.
Fidelity Go charges no advisory fee under $25,000 and 0.35% a year at $25,000 and above, and above that threshold it includes unlimited coaching calls. Read the wording closely. Fidelity describes those sessions as coaching with a team of advisors, delivered in 30 minute calls on specific topics. That is a genuinely useful product for people still accumulating. It is a different animal from a planner who carries your situation across years.
Fidelity Wealth Services publishes general eligibility of $500,000 invested in eligible Fidelity accounts and an annual investment advisory fee of 0.50% to 1.50%. The account investment minimum for the program itself is $50,000. That fee range is a full percentage point wide, and the width tells you something useful: the number you pay is a function of what you enroll in and how you are served, not a posted rate you can look up in advance. If you evaluate this tier, the first thing to pin down in writing is where in that range you land and exactly what is included at that number.
Empower: dedicated advisors earlier, at a percentage of assets
Empower's published fee schedule is a straightforward tiered percentage. The Investment Services tier, $100,000 to $249,999, is priced at 0.89% a year. The Wealth Management tier, $250,000 to $999,999, is also 0.89%. The Private Client tier at $1M and above is 0.79% on the first $3M, 0.69% on the next $2M, 0.59% on the next $5M, and 0.49% above $10M.
What you get for it differs by band. Empower's own comparison lists a team advisor at Investment Services and two dedicated financial advisors at both Wealth Management and Private Client. Dedicated coverage arriving at $250,000 is earlier than most of this group, and that is a real feature.
It is also the highest ongoing rate here for a portfolio in the $500K to $1M range. At 0.89%, a $500,000 portfolio pays $4,450 a year. The same portfolio at Vanguard Personal Advisor Select pays no more than $1,500. Neither number is right or wrong in isolation. The question worth asking is what the extra $2,950 buys, and whether it buys coordination you would otherwise be doing yourself on a spreadsheet in December.
Side by Side
| Provider tier | Advisor model as published | How the fee is levied | What the published scope does not state |
|---|---|---|---|
| Vanguard Personal Advisor | Access to an advisor, not a dedicated one | About $30 per $10,000 a year | Whether one advisor carries the file across years |
| Vanguard Personal Advisor Select | Dedicated CFP professional at $500,000 | No more than $30 per $10,000 a year | Whether annual conversion sequencing is included |
| Schwab Intelligent Portfolios Premium | Planning support on a subscription | $300 once, then $30 monthly | What planning work happens outside the automated portfolio |
| Fidelity Go | Coaching from a team of advisors | 0.35% a year above $25,000 | Whether a single person owns the file |
| Fidelity Wealth Services | Dedicated advisor at higher balances | 0.50% to 1.50% a year | What determines where in the range a fee lands |
| Empower Wealth Management | Two dedicated advisors from $250,000 | 0.89% a year in that band | Whether the fee reflects complexity or only assets |
Provider websites, read 25 July 2026. Confirm current pricing on the provider's own page.
The decisions the published scope does not mention
Here is the honest verdict shape. These tiers publish clear pricing and a clear investment service, and their published materials generally do not state whether the decisions below are covered. That is an absence of published information rather than a judgment about the quality of anyone's work, and the only way to settle it is to ask the provider directly. No comparison between these providers is intended here, and nothing on this page presents any advisor network as superior to any of them. Three examples make the questions concrete.
Withdrawal sequencing is the order in which you draw from taxable, tax deferred, and Roth accounts. Getting it wrong does not show up as a bad return. It shows up as a higher lifetime tax bill and a larger required distribution later. Required distributions begin at 73 for people born from 1951 through 1959 and at 75 for people born in 1960 or later, and the years between retiring and that first distribution are typically the most valuable planning window a retiree will ever have.
Roth conversion timing is the second. A conversion is not a yes or no question. It is a how much this year question, answered against your current bracket, your future required distributions, and your Medicare exposure. Answering it once is not planning. Answering it every year, with the numbers in front of you, is.
Medicare is the third, and it is the one most commonly missed. The 2026 first surcharge tier begins above $109,000 for a single filer and above $218,000 for a married couple filing jointly, and Medicare uses a two year lookback, so 2026 premiums are set by 2024 income. A December conversion that nudges you one dollar over a threshold raises a bill you will not see for two years. The IRMAA calculator and the Medicare hub are the places to model that before you act rather than after.
None of this requires an expensive advisor. It requires an advisor whose job description includes it, and whose fee is not structured so that portfolio management is the only thing that reliably gets attention.
How advisors are vetted for the standard this post just defined
This post defined what good looks like: one named human who knows your file, and a scope that includes tax, Medicare, and sequencing rather than stopping at the portfolio. That is the standard the network on this site is vetted against.
Credentials are verified before an advisor joins rather than taken on trust. Years of experience are reviewed, because the coordination work described above is pattern recognition and patterns take time to learn. Regulatory history is reviewed as part of the same process. The orientation is education first rather than product sales, which matters more than it sounds, because a fiduciary standard is easy to claim and harder to demonstrate. Every advisor in the network runs an independent practice and holds to a fiduciary standard when advising, and coverage is nationwide. One advisor is matched to your situation rather than leaving you to sort a directory yourself, because the point of the standard above is continuity with a single person.
The Right Retirement Plan does not manage money, hold assets, or give personalized advice. It is an education and matching hub, and each advisor in the network runs an independent practice.
For the decisions these tiers do not publish scope on, see where an advisor adds measurable value and what a real plan document contains.
The fee page is the easiest thing to compare and the least useful thing to compare. Read it, then read the scope page, then ask what happens in the specific year that matters most to you: the year you claim Social Security, or the year you turn 73 or 75. If the answer comes back vague, the price was never the problem. Retirement planning, explained in plain English, mostly comes down to knowing which questions the thing you are paying for actually answers.