What a Financial Advisor Would Actually Check in Your Portfolio

What it is. Whether the stock and bond split matches when you actually need the money, not when you said you would retire.

The measurement is easy and the judgement is not. A 70/30 split is right or wrong only relative to a horizon, a spending plan and how you behaved the last time markets fell. An advisor is testing the assumptions behind the number rather than the number.

What it is. What share of the whole portfolio sits in one company or one sector once you look inside the funds.

The common finding is not a deliberate bet. It is three broad funds that each hold the same handful of large companies, so the portfolio is far more concentrated than the fund count suggests. This is arithmetic and you can run it yourself.

The method is in how to check portfolio concentration.

What it is. Whether two funds are doing one job, and the weighted expense ratio across everything you hold.

An advisor will usually find at least one pair of funds that substantially duplicate each other, and will know the weighted cost within minutes. Both are measurable without any professional judgement at all.

See how to find overlap in your ETFs and what an expense ratio is.

What it is. Whether tax-inefficient holdings sit in the sheltered accounts and efficient ones in the taxable account.

The principle is simple and applying it needs a view of your whole tax picture, current and expected. It is one of the clearest places a professional adds value, because the gain is real, recurring, and invisible if nobody looks across accounts.

What it is. Which specific lots would be sold to rebalance, and whether recent purchases have disallowed a loss.

Most people never look at lot-level detail, and rebalancing without it can realise a much larger gain than necessary. The wash-sale interaction across accounts, including a spouse's, is the part that catches even careful people.

See cost basis and the wash-sale rule, which is the part that catches careful people because it reaches across accounts.

What it is. How much is sitting uninvested, deliberately or otherwise, and what it is costing.

Idle cash accumulates quietly from dividends, a sale never reinvested, or an emergency fund that grew past its purpose. It is easy to measure and easy to miss.

What it is. Who inherits each account, and whether that still reflects your intentions.

Not a portfolio question and routinely the most consequential thing found in a review. Beneficiary designations override a will, and they are frequently years out of date after a marriage, divorce or death. Almost nothing prompts you to check.

What it is. Your accounts alongside a spouse's, a pension, property, a business, and any equity compensation.

Two individually sensible portfolios can combine into something nobody would have chosen, most often heavily overweight one employer or one sector. No single-account tool sees this, which is why it survives so long undetected.

These are the honest case for paying someone, and they have a shape in common: each requires information that lives outside any single account, or a judgement that depends on your circumstances rather than your holdings. Neither is a limitation that better software fixes, because the constraint is what the tool can see and what it is allowed to decide.

Concentration, overlap, total fund cost and cash drag are measurement. So is performance against an index, and so is drift from whatever targets you set. None of it requires professional judgement, and running it first means the paid conversation starts with the interesting questions rather than the arithmetic.

Doing that before a first meeting is covered in analyze your portfolio before you hire an advisor. An assistant connected to your own brokerage account can do the measurement without taking custody, which is how Walnut works, and it does none of the four items above.

Whether your holdings will do well. No part of this list forecasts anything. A review establishes what you own, what it costs, what it risks and how it is arranged, and none of that is a view about future returns. An advisor who converts a review into confident predictions has changed activity without telling you.

Whether you should have bought what you bought. Reviews look forward from where you are. The purchase price of a position matters for tax and for nothing else, and relitigating old decisions is a way of spending a meeting without improving anything.

What the market will do. Worth stating because the request comes up in almost every review and the honest answer is always the same. The allocation question is about how much of an unknowable outcome you want exposure to, which is answerable, rather than about what the outcome will be, which is not.

The eight items above describe a piece of work with a beginning and an end, and it is worth noticing that this is not the same shape as an ongoing percentage of your assets. A review is a project; a management fee is a subscription. Many people want the first and buy the second.

Three routes deliver the review on its own. A one-time financial plan for a fixed project fee, after which you implement it yourself. A few hourly sessions with a fee-only planner, which suits people who want the two or three judgement calls rather than the whole document. Or an annual check arranged as a flat retainer, which keeps a relationship without tying the cost to your balance.

Any of them costs a fraction of a percentage-of-assets arrangement over a decade, and all three are covered in the fee-model comparison. The reason to know the eight items first is that it tells you which route you actually need.

It is rarely the allocation. In review after review the item with the largest consequence is the beneficiary designation, because it overrides a will and because nothing in ordinary life prompts anyone to check it. A retirement account still naming a former spouse does exactly what it says, whatever the will intends.

That is worth sitting with when weighing whether a review is worth paying for. The value is not always better returns or a cleverer allocation. Sometimes it is one form, updated, that no amount of portfolio analysis would ever have surfaced.