Do you need someone to manage your portfolio? If not, sounds like you're doing the right things in terms of simplifying and watching tax efficiencies. Having said that, we've consolidated everything at Vanguard. And, in order to proactively plan ahead for my wife in case something happens to me, we've signed up for Vanguard PAS. We're pretty satisfied and they make everything super easy. For example, they set us up with a Spending Fund. We got to pick the Vanguard money market fund to use. Our advisor helped us to choose upper and lower thresholds to keep in it. So, when we have extra left over cash in our outside bank account (which pays almost nothing in interest), we just push a button on Vanguard's website and it automatically transfers whatever amount we want into our spending fund. If it grows past our upper limit, then the system automatically distributes it between the total US stock and total international stock ETFs in our taxable account. I did this for the first time today with the help of a Vanguard PAS customer service rep who I contacted via live chat. (Apparently, PAS clients — even if they don't have $5 million or more — get access to a live chat button, so I'll probably never have to call in for general service questions again.) After a few more meetings now with our advisor, I'm also thinking we'll probably not need to resubscribe to PlanVision, which was our backup plan for more detailed financial planning support. We're finding that Vanguard PAS offers a more compact version of eMoney's reports. While not quite as extensive as the full eMoney presentations that PlanVision provides access to, I've found the PAS planning resources to give us all of the basic data and projections for expenses, cash flow and taxes that we'll probably need. Our PAS advisor has also been great to work with in terms of tailoring some of eMoney's functions. For example, he went into the system and adjusted our inherited IRA to reflect that it qualified as a lifetime stretch IRA, meaning it doesn't have to be wound down over 10 years. We've now got tax-loss harvesting, rebalancing, RMD calculations (as well as distributions into our spending fund) and monthly distributions into our bank account handled either automatically or in conjunction with our advisor. The eMoney projections have proved already to be good fodder for discussions with our advisor about ways to plan ahead for RMDs, taxes and managing expected tax liabilities.
Statistics: Posted by BetaTracker — Fri Feb 13, 2026 3:20 pm — Replies 10 — Views 887