Searching for the “Best Retirement Advisor in Virginia Beach?” Here’s How to Actually Compare Them

If you search for the “best retirement planner in Virginia Beach,” you’ll probably find plenty of names. But a list of names doesn’t necessarily help you make a better decision. No single retirement advisor is automatically the best fit for everyone in Virginia Beach. Your retirement, family, investments, taxes, Social Security benefits, healthcare costs, priorities, and concerns are your own.

A more useful question to ask yourself is: How do I find the retirement planner who is right for my situation?

The answer to that question starts with you deciding what you really need from a retirement planner and even looking to better understand how a professional planner will help you make decisions throughout retirement.

Are You Asking “What Should I Look For in a Retirement Planner?”

The short answer: You want to look for a retirement planner with the experience that matches the main decisions you need to make. You will also want an advisor who clearly explains how they are compensated, who acts as a fiduciary, and who can look at your retirement plan holistically. You will find it beneficial if they can show you how taxes, investments, retirement income, Social Security, Medicare and your long-term goals fit together.

When thinking more critically about who you want to work with you should also understand something people don't always think to ask: What will it actually be like to work with this person?

That question matters a great deal to Charles “Charlie” Culver, our co-founder and the owner of Martello Retirement & Wealth. Charlie has spent years thinking about the traditional financial planning experience, including the parts he believes create unnecessary friction.

As he has put it:

“I’m trying to re-architect how people interact with the retirement planning process: make it better, more enjoyable, and easier to get started.”

The mindset that Charlie brings to this industry has increasingly shaped how Martello frames their retirement planning services: it is not just about what advice someone should receive, but how the process of getting that advice can become clearer, more useful and easier to navigate.

Here are five questions worth asking when you are comparing retirement planners in Virgina Beach.

1. Are You a Fiduciary?

This is one of the simplest questions you can ask a retirement and financial advisor. A fiduciary is legally required to put your interests ahead of his or her own. Be aware that some advisors are fiduciaries only part of the time, when they give investment advice but not when they sell you a product, so the question to ask is whether they act as a fiduciary at all times. If you're interviewing multiple retirement planners, we recommend that you ask directly whether they operate as a fiduciary all the time.

Don't be afraid to follow up with these questions:

• How are you compensated?

• Do you receive commissions?

• Do you receive compensation for recommending certain products?

• Are there financial incentives I should know about?

Martello is a fee-only fiduciary. Our only compensation is the fees our clients pay us: we don’t sell products, we don’t hold insurance licenses, and we don’t receive commissions from anyone. Whatever retirement advisory firm you consider, you should understand who is paying them and how. That's why we have a fiduciary alignment agreement. It affirms the professional standard we commit to serving our clients. 

2. How Much of the Retirement Planner’s Work Is Actually Retirement Planning?

Investment management, day-to-day personal finances, and estate planning are all related to retirement planning, but they are separate specialties (and estate documents are drafted by an attorney, not a retirement planner). Your financial, estate, and retirement plans evolve as you approach retirement, which also means the questions you ask an advisor might change depending on the stage of life you are in.

If you are within 5 to 10 years of retirement, instead of mainly asking “How much should I save for retirement?”, you should make sure that a financial advisor who specializes in retirement planning can help you answer these questions:

• When should I claim Social Security?

• Which account should I withdraw from first?

• Should I consider Roth conversions?

• How much can I reasonably spend?

• How will Required Minimum Distributions affect my taxes?

• Could my income increase my Medicare premiums?

• What happens financially if one spouse dies before the other?

• How should my estate plan coordinate with everything else?

These decisions interact with one another. That's why it can be useful to ask an advisor how much of their work focuses specifically on people approaching or living in retirement.

3. How Do Taxes Fit into Their Retirement Planning Process?

Taxes shouldn't necessarily be a conversation that happens once a year when your return is prepared. Retirement can introduce a long list of tax decisions. Traditional IRA and 401(k) withdrawals, Social Security, and Roth conversions all affect your taxable income, and your taxable income in turn determines how much of your Social Security is taxed and whether you owe a Medicare premium surcharge. So one retirement decision can affect several others.

That's why Martello takes a tax-focused approach to retirement planning. Instead of viewing the investment portfolio, Social Security, and taxes as three separate conversations, the goal is to understand how those decisions work together. It also helps that Charlie is an Enrolled Agent, a tax practitioner licensed by the IRS, which is unusual for a retirement planner and means tax questions don’t get handed off to “ask your CPA” by default.

We recommend that when interviewing retirement planners, you ask them: “When you make a retirement income recommendation, how do you account for its tax impact?”

Their answer can tell you quite a bit about how they approach retirement planning and if they are a good fit for what you need.

4. How Do You See Social Security Fitting In With My Other Retirement Decisions?

It's very easy for any retirement planner to reduce Social Security planning to one question: What age should I claim? But your Social Security claiming decision doesn't just happen in isolation. Your health, longevity expectations, marital status, other income, portfolio withdrawals and tax situation can all matter. Which is why we believe a retirement planner should be able to explain how they evaluate Social Security within your larger retirement income plan, and not just simply tell their clients to claim at one particular age.

Before hiring a retirement planner, we think you should ask them: “Can you show me how different Social Security claiming strategies affect the rest of my retirement plan?”

This is a much more revealing question about their holistic view of retirement planning than simply asking if they provide “Social Security planning.”

5. What Will the Financial Planning Process Be Like When Working With a Retirement Planner?

We want our clients to ask this question. We really want them to think about what happens after they say, “I need help.” It allows the Martello team to showcase how we do things differently and make sure that our client can find the process enjoyable and not frustrating.

So, before you choose to work with a retirement planner, you’ll want to ask how the sauce gets made, because you might find you are incompatible with their style of doing things.

Here are some questions you can ask retirement advisors to better understand their process:

• How long will it take to get started?

• What information do I need to provide?

• How will you collect my documents?

• What software and tools do you use in the retirement planning process?

• How many meetings are involved?

• When will I start to see useful information or changes being made?

• How are your recommendations tracked after the meeting?

• What happens when something changes six months later?

Our Martello Team and owner, Charlie, have been particularly interested in this part of the industry. One of our top concerns for our clients is that seeking financial and retirement advice can feel like a bigger undertaking than it needs to be. Someone realizes they have a retirement question, schedules a meeting, waits, fills out forms, gathers documents and goes through several steps before getting to the issue that originally made them seek help.

Charlie's preference on the Martello retirement planning process is pretty straightforward:

“I’m all about getting you to useful answers faster.”

That doesn't mean rushing important financial decisions, because we still believe that retirement planning deserves careful analysis. It just means we’ve been asking whether all of the friction surrounding retirement planning is actually necessary, and rebuilding our process wherever the answer is no.

How To Compare Retirement Planners

Create your own retirement planner comparison sheet. A ranking or an AI summary can give you a starting list, but it can’t tell you what it will be like to work with someone. Meet with the firms you're considering and ask each one the same questions:

Then pay attention to something less measurable: do their answers make sense to you? You should leave the conversation with a retirement advisor with more clarity, not more confusion.

Is Martello Retirement & Wealth the Right Retirement Planner For You?

Martello Retirement & Wealth, based in Virginia Beach, doesn't need to be the right advisor for everybody. That's the point of doing this research: we want to be the right fit for the clients we do work with. We have designed the Martello process for pre-retirees and retirees who want comprehensive, ongoing planning. Our fee structure tends to make the most sense for households with roughly $750,000 or more in investable assets; we don’t have a hard account minimum, and our fees, including our minimum annual fee, are published on our fees page and in our Form ADV.

If you think we might be a good fit for you then you may also want to know that we specialize in the following:

• A fee-only fiduciary relationship

• Tax-focused retirement planning

• Social Security and retirement income analysis

• Investment management coordinated with your broader plan

• Proactive rather than purely reactive planning

• Technology that helps streamline the planning experience

• Ongoing guidance as your circumstances change

Our goal isn't to be the retirement planner everyone else considers “best.” Our goal is to be the best retirement advisor for you and what you need.

Who Is the Best Retirement Planner For You?

As you compare retirement planners, add one more question to your list: is this advisor still improving how they serve clients, or following the same process because that’s how it has always been done?

For Charlie, that last question has become an important one. Because sometimes innovation starts with something as simple as: “Why isn’t it better than this?”

If you're beginning to think through your own retirement, you can learn more about Martello's planning process, take the Retirement Readiness Quiz, or schedule a conversation to see whether Martello's approach might fit what you're looking for.

Disclaimers:

Martello Retirement and Wealth, LLC, doing business as Martello Retirement & Wealth, is a registered investment adviser. Registration does not imply a certain level of skill or training. Martello may only transact business in states where it is registered or exempt from registration. This article is for general educational purposes and is not personalized investment, tax, or legal advice, nor an offer of advisory services. “Fee-only” means Martello is compensated solely by fees paid by its clients and does not receive commissions or other sales-based compensation; our fees and conflicts of interest are described in our Form ADV Part 2A, available at martelloretirement.com or adviserinfo.sec.gov.

Martello Retirement and Wealth, LLC is a Registered Investment Adviser. For more information about our firm, including our services, fees, and conflicts of interest, please refer to our Form ADV Part 2A, available on our website at https://www.martelloretirement.com/l/adv.

This content is for informational and educational purposes only and is not intended to provide specific tax, legal, or investment advice. Tax laws are complex and subject to change. Always consult with a qualified tax professional or attorney regarding your specific situation before making any tax-related or estate-planning-related decisions.

Past performance or hypothetical scenarios are not indicative of future results.

There are no guarantees that any tax or estate planning strategies discussed will achieve specific outcomes or avoid future tax liabilities.

The information provided is general in nature and does not consider your individual circumstances, financial goals, or needs. Personalized financial or tax advice can only be provided after a comprehensive understanding of your personal situation.

Unless expressly stated otherwise, any tax advice contained in this communication is not intended or written to be used, and cannot be used, for the purpose of avoiding penalties under the Internal Revenue Code.