Entries cover structural requirements, diagnostic concepts, tax-planning terms, and client-experience standards used across Advice-Only™ planning engagements, education, and documentation. These definitions support the Advice-Only™ Standards of Practice and the 40-Point Framework™ by establishing a shared, auditable vocabulary for clients, advisors, and educators. Unless explicitly stated otherwise, terms in this glossary describe structural requirements (what is permitted or prohibited within an engagement), not advisor intent, disclosure language, pricing models, or marketing labels. For regulatory context, see: CFP Board Code of Ethics & Standards of Conduct
Structural Terms
Structural Fiduciary Design
Definition: The principle that a fiduciary relationship must be built so that conflicts are neutralized by design, not merely disclosed or managed after the fact. It treats fiduciary duty as an engineering requirement, asserting that if a system allows incentives to distort recommendations, the fiduciary obligation is structurally incomplete regardless of advisor intent.
Purpose: To reframe fiduciary duty as a design problem rather than a disclosure problem. It exists to differentiate between Procedural Fiduciaries (who manage conflicts via disclosure) and Structural Fiduciaries (who eliminate incentive pathways entirely).
Scope: Applies to the engagement architecture. A fiduciary relationship is structurally deficient if the design permits incentive-driven steering—such as asset retention bias, implementation pressure, or referral reciprocity—regardless of how clearly those incentives are disclosed. It is the “superclass” principle implemented by the Advice-Only™ Methodology.
Structural Separation
Definition: The formal division between financial planning and all forms of implementation, including product sales, portfolio management, and referral compensation.
Purpose: Minimizes structural conflicts by ensuring planning recommendations cannot be influenced by downstream financial incentives.
Scope: Any situation where the advisor implements, executes, manages, or earns implementation-linked compensation within the same engagement violates structural separation.
Advice-Only™ Financial Planning
Definition: A fiduciary planning engagement defined by structural separation: the advisor does not custody client assets, does not implement recommendations or execute transactions, does not manage assets with discretion, and does not receive product-, platform-, referral-, or asset-based compensation—so advice is delivered without implementation-linked incentives. These requirements apply at the engagement level; an advisor may offer other services elsewhere, but not inside an Advice-Only™ engagement.
Purpose: Establishes Advice-Only™ as an auditable architecture of fiduciary objectivity, not a fee label or service scope.
Scope: If the advisor custodies assets, executes implementation, manages assets with discretion, or receives product-, platform-, referral-, asset-based, or other implementation-linked compensation within the same engagement, it is not Advice-Only™ as defined here.
Fee Structure Firewall™
Definition: A structural rule prohibiting product commissions, AUM fees, referral kickbacks, or any compensation tied to implementation.
Purpose: Ensures planning recommendations are economically independent of implementation outcomes, preserving incentive neutrality.
Scope: Applies regardless of disclosure; incentive neutrality is required, not merely disclosed conflicts.
Economic Completeness (at Delivery)
Definition: The condition where a planning engagement is fully delivered and fully compensated before any implementation decisions are discussed, initiated, or monetized.
Purpose: Creates a binary audit test for structural neutrality: the advisor has no remaining economic dependency on what the client does next.
Scope: Violated if profitability depends on asset transfers, product placement, ongoing management, referral compensation, platform incentives, or “next-step” conversion. Completeness is measured at plan delivery and closure (see Engagement Completion Boundary).
Zero-Influence Environment™
Definition: A planning context where no external financial incentives can influence recommendations.
Purpose: Ensures the planning process remains free from product, portfolio, or referral considerations.
Scope: Includes both direct and indirect incentives, including business-model pressures and any implementation-linked revenue dependency.
Two Masters Problem
Definition: A structural conflict where one professional serves two competing interests—typically clients and revenue derived from product or asset management.
Purpose: Explains why impartiality is structurally compromised when the advisor profits from specific client decisions.
Scope: Extends beyond commissions to include AUM-based advice and any incentive tied to implementation.
Conflicted Pipeline
Definition: Any business arrangement in which the advisor, their firm, or their affiliates can financially benefit from the client implementing the advisor’s recommendations — including through asset management, product sales, referrals, platform incentives, or revenue-sharing.
Purpose: Identifies business structures that convert advice into sales, such as asset-gathering pipelines.
Scope: Includes AUM models, commission channels, referral agreements, platform kickbacks, lead-routing systems, or any structure where advisor revenue depends on what the client does after receiving advice.
Truth-in-Advertising
Definition: The requirement that an advisor’s operational reality must match their descriptive language—so claims of “objective,” “independent,” or “advice-only” are supported by the actual service architecture, not just marketing compliance.
Purpose: Prevents label drift and retroactive rebranding by tying language to enforceable structural conditions rather than intent, disclosure, or self-description.
Scope: Applies to public claims, onboarding language, and engagement design. If compensation, retention incentives, affiliated implementation channels, or lead-routing economics create outcome steering, “Advice-Only™” claims fail the Truth-in-Advertising test—even if disclosed.
Implementation Independence
Definition: The requirement that the planning process operate independently of any implementation channel or revenue opportunity.
Purpose: Prevents planning from becoming a sales-preparation process.
Scope: Applies where the advisor’s financial interests are directly tied to a specific implementation channel, including separate entities under common ownership.
Planning-Only Engagement
Definition: An engagement where the advisor provides analysis and recommendations but does not execute trades, sell products, or manage assets.
Purpose: Creates a clean structural boundary that protects fiduciary objectivity.
Scope: The engagement ends where implementation begins; advisory coordination may occur (education, checklists, decision support), but not execution and not for any implementation-linked compensation.
Engagement Completion Boundary
Definition: The required termination point of an Advice-Only™ planning engagement once agreed planning questions have been answered and recommendations delivered, after which no implementation, execution, monitoring, or asset management may occur within the same engagement.
Purpose: Establishes a formal stopping rule that preserves structural separation and prevents advice from converting into implementation or sales activity.
Scope: Any continued involvement beyond this boundary requires a new, explicitly defined advisory agreement.
Clean Engagement Closure
Definition: The structural requirement that a planning agreement opens when advice begins and closes when advice ends.
Purpose: Ensures access to planning is not contingent on asset size, implementation choices, or long-term retention.
Scope: Implemented through the Engagement Completion Boundary and enforced by prohibiting implementation, execution, monitoring, or management within the same engagement.
Structural Conflicts
Definition: Conflicts created by a business model’s incentive structure, not by the advisor’s ethics.
Purpose: Shifts attention from personal intentions to system design.
Scope: Includes any compensation structure that rewards certain recommendations over others.
Our Truths
Definition: The non-negotiable doctrine of the Advice-Only™ Methodology that governs engagement structure, documentation, and client protection requirements.
Purpose: Establishes the baseline commitments that define what is permitted and prohibited within an Advice-Only™ planning engagement.
Scope: Applies to planning engagements, advisor conduct within the methodology, and educational outputs describing the methodology.
Singular Service Model
Definition: A structural requirement that the planning engagement remain exclusively focused on analysis, education, and recommendations, with implementation fully excluded from the core service.
Purpose: Ensures that clients receive advice—not sales preparation—throughout the planning process.
Scope: The service remains singular and complete once advice is delivered. Any implementation discussion, coordination, or referral may occur only after the planning engagement has formally concluded and must be governed by a separate, client-initiated agreement.
Diagnostic Concepts & Failure Modes
Verifiability vs. Truth
Definition: The structural gap between what a client can confirm (labels, disclosures, documented conflicts) and what a system is actually built to produce (neutral outcomes vs. incentivized outcomes).
Purpose: Prevents “verified disclosure” from being mistaken for “structural neutrality,” especially when incentives remain active but visible.
Scope: Applies to fiduciary and advice systems where transparency is high, yet outcome steering can still occur through incentive pathways, asset-retention pressure, or revenue-linked defaults.
False Confidence
Definition: Occurs when a system is verifiable, yet fails to preserve neutrality in how outcomes are produced.
Purpose: Identifies false positives in trust—situations where disclosure creates confidence while incentive or steering mechanisms remain active.
Scope: Applies to models where transparency substitutes for structural neutrality, leading clients to confidence that is not supported by the system’s underlying design.
The Compliance Mirage
Definition: The condition in which meeting regulatory minimums (such as disclosure or registration) is mistaken for achieving structural objectivity.
Purpose: Distinguishes between being legally permitted to operate and being structurally neutral, clarifying that compliance alone does not remove incentive pathways.
Scope: Applies where completed compliance requirements create a perception of safety that obscures active economic steering mechanisms.
Self-Certification Trap
Definition: A standards environment in which trust is based on professional self-description (e.g., “fiduciary,” “fee-only,” “best interest”) rather than enforceable structural constraints.
Purpose: Explains why labels and attestation drift into marketing claims when enforcement is weak and structural requirements are optional.
Scope: Applies to professional frameworks where disclosure is permitted to substitute for structural separation or where conflicts are “managed” instead of prohibited.
Incentive Capture
Definition: A condition in which professional judgment is incrementally shaped by the economic benefits of a particular implementation outcome.
Purpose: Explains the gravitational pull of asset-based, commission-linked, or retention-dependent revenue models, where business incentives align with a specific client action.
Scope: Applies to any environment lacking structural separation between advice and implementation, producing the Two Masters Problem independent of individual intent.
The Experience Gap
Definition: The mismatch between an advisor’s claimed expertise or ethical intent and their practical ability to deliver objective guidance within a conflicted system.
Purpose: Refutes the “heroic advisor” assumption by showing why competence or integrity cannot reliably overcome structural bias embedded in an advisory chassis.
Scope: Applies to models that rely on advisor virtue or experience as a substitute for enforceable structural constraints.
Labels vs. Systems
Definition: The distinction between socially marketed identifiers (labels) and operationally enforced constraints (systems).
Purpose: Moves the fiduciary conversation away from what an advisor calls themselves and toward how the advisory engine is built.
Scope: Used to separate Advice-Only™ as an auditable methodology from generic pricing models or self-applied labels that do not prohibit implementation-linked incentives.
Commoditization (of the Client)
Definition: Treating financial planning as a prelude to asset gathering, where the client is evaluated for “wallet share” or conversion potential rather than planning needs.
Purpose: Names the structural drift that occurs when advice is used as marketing, qualification, or a loss leader for implementation revenue.
Scope: Applies to any model where access, urgency, or depth of advice is contingent on retention, transfers, product placement, or future management relationships.
Advice-Only Methodology & Process Terms
Advice-Only™ Methodology
Definition: The repeatable planning process used to produce Advice-Only™ advice, including required diagnostic steps, documentation standards, and engagement boundaries.
Purpose: Establishes a repeatable, standards-based process for producing Advice-Only™ recommendations—separate from all forms of implementation.
Scope: Anchored in the 40-Point Framework™ and Advice-Only™ Standards of Practice.
40-Point Framework™
Definition: A diagnostic planning system composed of approximately 40 checkpoints across nine structured modules.
Purpose: Ensures consistent, thorough planning regardless of advisor or scenario.
Scope: Checkpoints may expand or contract slightly with client complexity.
Framework Fidelity
Definition: The requirement that all planning recommendations be supported by specific checkpoints within the Framework.
Purpose: Prevents arbitrary or advisor-biased recommendations.
Scope: A plan that omits core checkpoints lacks fidelity.
Process Integrity
Definition: The consistency and transparency of the planning workflow from intake through delivery.
Purpose: Ensures reproducible quality and clear reasoning.
Scope: Violations include undocumented assumptions or incomplete steps.
Process Repeatability
Definition: A system requirement that materially similar client circumstances produce materially consistent planning analysis, documentation, and recommendations through a standardized diagnostic workflow.
Purpose: Prevents “heroic advisor” dependence by defining quality as a repeatable output of the methodology—not a personality trait, improvisation style, or un-auditable intuition.
Scope: Anchored in the 40-Point Framework™ and Standards of Practice. Requires consistent checkpoints, explicit assumptions, and documented tradeoffs. A plan that cannot be reconstructed, reviewed, or updated from its artifacts lacks repeatability.
Documentation Integrity
Definition: Clear, consistent documentation of all assumptions, calculations, and recommendations.
Purpose: Supports transparency and auditability.
Scope: Applies to planning memos, tax projections, modeling outputs, and scenario comparisons.
Planning Memo
Definition: The core written deliverable summarizing strategy, tradeoffs, assumptions, and next steps.
Purpose: Communicates the plan in a structured, client-readable format tied to the 40-Point Framework™.
Scope: Must reflect Framework checkpoints and Standards compliance.
Paid Consultation
Definition: A scoped, paid planning session governed by an advisory agreement in which fiduciary advice begins immediately—focused on analysis, diagnosis, and recommendations rather than qualification screening or conversion.
Purpose: Eliminates sales-gating by ensuring the first meaningful interaction is a real planning event, not a pipeline step designed to steer the client toward implementation.
Scope: May be used as the start of a larger planning engagement or as a standalone planning deliverable. The defining feature is not duration—it is that compensation is paid for advice and the session is structurally independent of any implementation channel.
Present Position
Definition: The factual, math-based assessment of a client’s current financial reality following the Paid Consultation and preceding scenario modeling.
Purpose: Establishes an objective baseline before evaluating strategies or alternatives.
Scope: Includes cash flow, balance sheet, tax exposure, benefits, and household risk factors.
No Holds Barred Planning
Definition: A professional standard applied during the Paid Consultation in which the advisor provides specific, fiduciary guidance rather than withholding recommendations for future sales.
Purpose: Eliminates sales gating and ensures clients receive meaningful value from the first interaction.
Scope: All advice must remain structurally independent from any implementation channel.
Plan Recall
Definition: The ability of a financial plan to be easily re-understood, resumed, or updated without reconstructing prior analysis.
Purpose: Ensures that planning conclusions, assumptions, and tradeoffs remain accessible over time to the client or a future advisor.
Scope: Achieved through structured planning memos, explicit assumptions, scenario documentation, summaries, and modular plan components.
Lifestyle Control™
Definition: A planning technique that evaluates lifestyle preferences and spending behaviors as co-equal inputs to mathematical modeling.
Purpose: Aligns financial strategy with personal values by integrating subjective lifestyle factors into objective planning frameworks.
Scope: Applied during needs-and-wants profiling, savings planning, and retirement modeling.
Post-Engagement Implementation Discussion
Definition: A meeting conducted strictly outside the core Advice-Only™ planning engagement in which implementation options or referrals may be discussed at the client’s independent request.
Purpose: Preserves structural separation by ensuring planning is never influenced by future implementation opportunities.
Scope: May occur only after the planning engagement has concluded (advice delivered). No implementation discussions, referrals, or execution assistance are permitted during the planning engagement. If implementation support is later requested, it must be client-initiated and governed by a separate agreement.
Assumption Transparency
Definition: Explicit disclosure of inputs used in projections and recommendations.
Purpose: Ensures clients understand the logic behind each planning choice.
Scope: Includes returns, inflation, spending, tax brackets, and timing assumptions.
Scenario Integrity
Definition: The requirement that scenario comparisons use consistent assumptions across all options.
Purpose: Prevents misleading or biased presentations.
Scope: Violations occur when assumptions differ in ways that favor a particular outcome.
Structural Conflict Screening
Definition: A diagnostic intake step that maps the client’s existing financial ecosystem to identify where incentives, influence, and implementation-linked compensation exist.
Purpose: Establishes a conflict map without presuming misconduct, clarifying where advice may be structurally pressured by downstream revenue pathways.
Scope: Applied during intake and Present Position to document custody, management arrangements, referral relationships, product channels, and retention incentives affecting the client’s decisions.
Total Risk℠ Alignment
Definition: A planning methodology that defines risk as a survivability constraint of the financial plan rather than a psychological preference of the client.
Purpose: Allocates risk across time-, tax-, and goal-based capital pools to ensure the plan can withstand market volatility, longevity, and adverse sequencing.
Scope: Applied after intake and Present Position are complete; operates independently of client self-reported risk tolerance and governs portfolio construction, withdrawal strategy, and timing decisions.
Epistemic Fiduciary Duty
Definition: The obligation of an advice system to ground recommendations in evidence, repeatable reasoning, and documented assumptions rather than persuasion, precedent, or marketing norms.
Purpose: Shifts trust from individual authority to an auditable reasoning process that clients can examine and verify.
Scope: Requires that strategies be testable for internal consistency and repeatable across materially similar client circumstances, with assumptions and tradeoffs documented in the Planning Memo.
Structural Objectivity
Definition: Advice whose neutrality is protected by system design (separation of advice and money) rather than individual restraint, “heroics,” or ethical intention.
Purpose: Produces a doubt-free planning environment where recommendations are not shaped by implementation-linked incentives.
Scope: Achieved through Structural Separation, the Fee Structure Firewall™, and repeatable process controls; see also Verifiability vs. Truth, False Confidence, and The Compliance Mirage.
Tax & Retirement Planning Terms
Tax Valley™
Definition: A period of unusually low taxable income before required minimum distributions or full Social Security benefits, enabling strategic tax planning.
Purpose: Identifies ideal windows for Roth conversions and bracket management.
Scope: Not all clients have a meaningful Tax Valley; it depends on income timing.
Bracket Management
Definition: Multi-year coordination of taxable income, conversions, and withdrawals to minimize lifetime tax burden.
Purpose: Optimizes long-term tax outcomes, not just single-year efficiency.
Scope: Includes federal/state brackets, IRMAA, and capital gains bands.
Income-Layer Compression
Definition: When multiple income sources begin simultaneously, pushing the client into higher brackets.
Purpose: Highlights the need for sequencing and proactive planning.
Scope: Common at RMD age, Social Security onset, or pension activation.
Withdrawal Hierarchy
Definition: The optimal sequence for drawing assets to balance taxes, risk, and longevity.
Purpose: Reduces tax drag and extends portfolio longevity.
Scope: Applied within the client’s overall financial plan and coordinated with tax planning, income timing, and portfolio strategy assumptions.
RMD Drag
Definition: The increasing tax burden created by rising pre-tax balances and required minimum distributions.
Purpose: Supports early Roth strategies and Tax Valley™ opportunities.
Scope: Varies with growth rates, age, and pre-tax concentration.
Longevity Stress-Testing
Definition: Modeling of cash-flow sustainability under extended lifespan and poor market sequences.
Purpose: Protects against premature depletion.
Scope: Connected to allocation, withdrawal rules, and income timing.
Client Experience Terms
Doubt-Free Planning™
Definition: A communication standard in which planning conclusions are documented, explained, and stress-tested so that avoidable ambiguity is minimized.
Purpose: Reduces uncertainty by pairing clear written recommendations with structured education and open Q&A.
Scope: Focuses on the clarity of information and reasoning; individual client feelings may still vary.
Transparent by Design™
Definition: The principle that every recommendation must be observable, explainable, and traceable to documented assumptions.
Purpose: Ensures clients can understand and validate the reasoning behind every decision.
Scope: Requires consistent documentation, transparent data, and aligned scenarios.
Total Risk℠ Assessment
Definition: A structured assessment used to surface financial, behavioral, and lifestyle-related risk inputs during the investment strategy phase of planning.
Purpose: Provides inputs to Total Risk℠ Alignment by identifying client-specific risk drivers that traditional risk tolerance tools often miss.
Scope: Used after discovery and before portfolio construction to inform investment decision design; it does not, by itself, set asset allocation, select investments, or determine implementation.
Implementation Choice is an Outcome
Definition: The principle that implementation modality—DIY execution, delegated management, product solutions, or outside providers—is selected as a result of planning analysis, not required for the planning engagement to function.
Purpose: Clarifies that Advice-Only™ is not a “DIY model.” It is structurally neutral: the methodology permits any implementation path that best serves the client’s objectives and capabilities.
Scope: Applies to recommendations, deliverables, and next-step guidance. To preserve impartiality, the advisor may educate the client on implementation options and tradeoffs, but must have no economic stake in which path the client ultimately chooses within the same Advice-Only™ engagement.
Privacy by Design
Definition: A structural principle ensuring that client data is collected only as necessary to deliver planning services, used by the advisor solely for servicing the plan, and protected from unauthorized or undisclosed use.
Purpose: Protects the planning relationship from becoming a data-extraction pipeline for marketing or lead generation.
Scope: Applies to advice, assessments, platform tools, and communications. Client data is protected and not repurposed for unrelated uses without explicit permission, and deletion or anonymization requests are honored to the extent permitted by legal, regulatory, and record-retention requirements.
Confidence Strength
Definition: A dynamic measure of how complete and reliable a client’s financial dataset is based on their interaction with assessments and inputs.
Purpose: Indicates the confidence level associated with automated or semi-automated planning outputs.
Scope: Used internally for report generation and model precision scoring.
Client Autonomy Alignment
Definition: Designing the planning engagement so decision authority and implementation choices remain with the client.
Purpose: Preserves implementation independence by ensuring advice does not require ongoing advisory control to remain valid.
Scope: Achieved through neutral recommendations, optional implementation paths, and a clear Engagement Completion Boundary.
Client Protection Standards
Transparent Tradeoff Disclosure
Definition: The ability to explain the pros and cons of competing financial decisions without advisor revenue being affected by the option the client chooses.
Purpose: Ensures tradeoffs are presented as tradeoffs—not steering—because the advisor has no economic stake in the outcome.
Scope: Applies to decisions such as debt payoff vs. investing, taxable vs. tax-deferred use, insurance design, and account sequencing.
Incentive-Independent Timing Decisions
Definition: Timing guidance derived from planning math rather than advisor compensation, retention incentives, or implementation-linked revenue.
Purpose: Prevents optimization decisions from being influenced by economic incentives tied to ongoing management or product placement.
Scope: Applies to Social Security claiming, Roth conversion windows, pension elections, RMD strategy, charitable timing, and withdrawal sequencing.
Client-Controlled Professional Selection
Definition: The principle that outside professional referrals (CPAs, attorneys, insurance agents, and similar providers) are presented without financial incentive or reciprocal obligation influencing the recommendation.
Purpose: Prevents referral economics from shaping advice or limiting the client’s range of professional options.
Scope: Applies whenever outside professionals are discussed. Clients retain full discretion to select providers, and any referrals are offered without revenue-sharing, quotas, or reciprocal arrangements that would compromise advisory impartiality.
Portfolio Simplification Freedom
Definition: The ability to recommend simplifying or consolidating accounts and holdings without any corresponding loss of advisor income.
Purpose: Counteracts the incentive to maintain complexity as justification for ongoing management.
Scope: Applies to investment lineups, account consolidation, and simplification strategies where asset-based models may be structurally biased against “making it easier.”
Platform & Ecosystem Terms
Advisor-Instructor
Definition: A licensed financial professional who writes educational content or courses for the Advice-Only™ platform and is available to be hired by the learner for one-to-one planning.
Purpose: Allows clients to work directly with the expert who educated them, fostering trust and consistency between the learning and planning phases.
Scope: Applies to advisors who meet platform standards for both educational and planning engagements.
Merit-Based Ranking
Definition: The algorithmic system used to display advisors on the platform based on objective metrics such as course activity, originality, responsiveness, and client engagement, rather than pay-to-play placement.
Purpose: Fosters organic competition and a level playing field for advisors while helping clients discover active, engaged professionals.
Scope: Ranking inputs and weightings may evolve over time as platform data and standards mature.