A financial advisor newsletter service for fee-only RIAs.

Read this part first: we are probably not right for broker-dealer advisors

If you are registered with a broker-dealer, your home office almost certainly maintains an approved-vendor list and a pre-approved content library, and anything outside it needs principal review before it goes to a single client. In practice that means an independent writer is slow, expensive, and sometimes simply not permitted.

We are telling you this before you spend a call on it. If that describes you, use what your firm already pays for. This page is written for fee-only RIAs — state-registered or SEC-registered — where the firm sets its own advertising policy and the chief compliance officer is you, your partner, or somebody you can actually reach.

The syndicated-content problem

Most advisor newsletters are the same newsletter. A vendor licenses a library, hundreds of firms drop their logo on the same market commentary, and a client with two advisors in their life gets the identical article twice in a week. It is technically compliant and it persuades no one.

FMG Suite, one of the better-known vendors in this space, publishes plans in the range of roughly $178 to $999 a month plus a setup fee. That is a real product and for some firms it is the right one. What it is not is your voice. If a prospect cannot tell your commentary from the firm down the road, the newsletter is a compliance artifact rather than a marketing asset.

We ghostwrite. A twenty-minute call becomes a piece that sounds like you, including your opinions — which is the part a library legally cannot supply.

Volatility is when clients decide what they think of you

Nobody calls their advisor about a flat quarter. They call after a bad week, and what they are really asking is whether you are still paying attention. An advisor who has already sent something thoughtful gets far fewer of those calls, and the ones they do get are calmer.

So the schedule has a hole in it on purpose. The monthly issue goes out on its date. On top of that we keep a same-week path for a market event: you call, we draft, you approve, it goes out as an email and a flipbook link while the story is still on the news. Not a prediction — a plain restatement of the plan, and why nothing about it has changed.

Compliance is a workflow problem, and we build for it

Under the SEC marketing rule, communications you send to clients and prospects are advertising, they have to be fair and balanced, and your firm has to be able to produce them on request. Testimonials and performance claims carry their own disclosure requirements, which is why we do not put either in a newsletter.

What that means in practice for how we work with you:

• Nothing ships without your written approval — you are the reviewer of record, always
• Every issue is archived with its send date, its recipient list and the approved version, so an exam request is a lookup and not an excavation
• Your standard disclosures and ADV language sit in the template, not in somebody’s memory
• No performance figures, no testimonials, no forward-looking claims about returns
• Any statistic in an issue names its source in the same sentence, or it does not run

What a fee-only firm should actually be writing about

Almost none of it is market commentary. The best-read pieces are the ones about a decision a real client is facing this month.

• Roth conversion windows in the low-income years between retiring and claiming Social Security
• Required minimum distributions, and the qualified charitable distribution most people have never had explained
• Why the fiduciary standard means something, said plainly, without naming a competitor
• A client’s adult child asking about a first 401(k) — the piece that gets forwarded to the next generation
• Concentrated stock from an employer, and the conversation nobody wants to have about it
• What you actually do in a down year, described before the down year arrives

Print, for this audience, is a status signal

A retired household with real assets is exactly the demographic that still reads mail, and a printed quarterly on decent stock reads as a firm that has been around and expects to be. It also survives on a coffee table, where a visiting friend picks it up.

The email edition still does most of the volume, and the flipbook link is what gets forwarded. Plenty of firms run digital-only for the monthly and print two or four issues a year for the top of the book. That is usually the sensible split, and print and postage are billed to you at cost with no markup.

The referral audience nobody mails

A fee-only firm grows through CPAs and estate attorneys more than through anything else. They send you clients when you are in mind and when they trust that you will not embarrass them.

A quarterly version of the same issue, sent to that short list of professionals, does that job — and it is a genuinely small mailing, so it costs almost nothing to add. We keep it as a separate track with its own list.

What we need from you and what we do not

About twenty minutes a month on a call, plus your approval. That is the whole ask. We interview, write, design, archive, publish the flipbook and send the email.

What we do not do is manage your social media — we stopped offering it, for anyone. If LinkedIn is the channel you actually need, we will say so and point you elsewhere rather than sell you a newsletter.