I’ve been a Fidelity customer since 1986 - that’s 36 years.
I’ve met with two Fidelity advisors in that entire time. The first time was about 20 years ago when I was the owner of a Boston based IT services company. I wanted to know more about an SEP Account, and how that might impact the benefits that I was paying to the rest of the team of employees. I was unimpressed, and never went back - until about 2 weeks ago.
In the meantime, I have been blessed with an awesome “by the hour” CPA who also has his Financial Advisor certification/license to help guide me through a fast paced growth IT business which I sold for a nice return. He also helped me build true wealth across multiple asset classes of investing and saving. I also credit him and TMF for helping me to land a sweet early retirement.
So back to today…
I met with my chosen (not appointed) advisor. I spent a lot of time preparing for the meeting by entering all of our account information into their Planning module (account pseudonyms and current values) and sharing our entire net worth - as we have accounts with other financial institutions as well. They have a pretty intuitive interface for entering the data into their model. I was interested to know how the outcome of their model would compare to the Quicken Lifetime planner model that I had been following for the past 15 years or so.
Our first meeting two weeks ago was to go over their fundamental lifetime planning assumptions, our current net worth, our lifestyle now and in the future as well as expenses, inflation rate, etc. It was interesting to see that many of the variables were the same as what Quicken used (ex inflation rate - Quicken → 3%, Fidelity → 2.5%)
The outcome from today was that we should have plenty to live out our lives under conservative assumptions. That’s good news.
I’m happy that having a second set of eyes on our current financial position and plan going forward for the next 20+ years for DW and me looks good - even with us being fairly conservatively invested!
So we will now look to set up some Emergency (savings), Protection (income) and Growth (inflation hedge) strategy going forward.
I now need to set up buckets of amounts in each category to manage going forward. I still need to get a handle on all of this.
The advisor also suggested for us to apply for a HELOC - which my CPA advisor suggested as well, but I never did it. I’m checking out rates with banks that are affiliated with the local Chamber of Commerce that I am on the Board of Directors of - maybe I can get deal 
I’m happy with Fidelity - they are not in my face despite having a number of high value accounts with them. They seem to be transparent in their costs / fees, etc. They have never failed to be “up and running” and on-time in those 36 years.
More to come on this, as I need to digest all of the information that we discussed today and I’m hoping to get input from all of my METAR friends!!
Thanks!
'38Packard