Your Advisor Helped You Build Wealth. Can They Help You Spend It?

A new study reveals that most advisors offering retirement income planning aren’t delivering at an advanced level. Here’s how to tell whether your advisor’s skill set still matches your needs.

You’ve worked with the same financial advisor for 15 or 20 years. They helped you max out your 401(k), stay disciplined through downturns, and watch your portfolio grow. You trust them. Why wouldn’t you?

But here’s a question worth sitting with: the person who was right for the accumulation years may not be the right fit for what comes next. Financial advisor retirement income planning requires a different playbook than the one that got you here, and a 2026 study from the American College of Financial Services suggests that the gap between what advisors say they do and what they can actually deliver is wider than most people realize.

That matters. The financial decisions you face in the five years before and after retirement are among the most consequential and least forgiving of your life. Claim Social Security at the wrong time, draw down the wrong account first, or ignore a Roth conversion window, and the cost can compound for decades. These decisions require a type of expertise your current advisor may not have, regardless of how well they’ve served you until now.

The Study That Should Get Your Attention

In May 2026, the American College of Financial Services released its Advisor Expertise Study, based on a survey of 478 financial professionals conducted in March of that year. The researchers introduced a new measurement tool called the Advisor Expertise Index, which scores advisors on demonstrated skill level across eight categories of financial planning. Scores range from 0 to 60, segmented into three tiers: basic (0 to 36), intermediate (37 to 54), and advanced (55 to 60).

Two findings stand out.

First, 51% of all advisory services across the eight categories are being delivered at only a basic or intermediate level. Half the work, in other words, isn’t reaching the highest standard of competence.

Second, and more pointed: among advisors who list retirement income planning as one of their top three services, only 43% are delivering it at an advanced level. That means nearly six in ten advisors who say retirement income planning is a core part of their practice aren’t demonstrating the depth of skill that retirees need most.

Tax planning showed a similar gap. Among advisors who count it as a top service, 57% are operating below the advanced threshold.

What makes this especially concerning is how the study defined expertise. The Advisor Expertise Index was inspired by Bloom’s Taxonomy, which ranks lower-level skills like remembering and understanding below higher-level skills like analyzing and creating. Advisors weren’t tested on trivia. They were scored on whether they could apply what they know in practice. An advisor who can explain what a Roth conversion is but can’t build a multi-year conversion strategy for a specific client would score lower, and that’s exactly the kind of gap retirees can’t afford.

Why Financial Advisor Retirement Income Planning Is a Different Discipline

During your working years, the financial planning equation is relatively straightforward. Save consistently. Invest in a diversified portfolio. Rebalance periodically. Stay the course. The goal is clear: grow the pile.

Once retirement begins, the challenge flips. The pile has to start paying you, and the order in which you do things matters enormously. This is the shift from accumulation to distribution, and it’s less like a chapter change and more like switching to an entirely different book.

As one CFP quoted in NerdWallet’s guide to switching advisors put it, some advisors remain stuck in the accumulation mindset rather than preparing for the phase when investment savings need to replace a steady paycheck. You’ve been saving into different account types for decades. Now the question isn’t how much to put in. It’s what to take out, when, and in what order.

Retirement income planning requires coordinating multiple moving parts simultaneously: withdrawal sequencing across taxable, tax-deferred, and tax-free accounts; Social Security timing for both spouses; Roth conversion windows before RMDs begin; IRMAA bracket management for Medicare premiums; and sequence-of-returns risk mitigation in the early years when your portfolio is most vulnerable.

None of those problems exist during accumulation. An advisor who spent 25 years picking funds and rebalancing quarterly may have never built a withdrawal sequence or modeled the tax impact of a Roth conversion ladder. That doesn’t make them a bad advisor. It makes them a different kind of advisor.

Consider a specific example. A couple retires at 63 with $1.2 million split across a traditional 401(k), a Roth IRA, and a taxable brokerage account. They plan to delay Social Security until 67 and 70, respectively. During those gap years, they need income, but every dollar they pull from the 401(k) is taxed as ordinary income. If they pull too much, they’ll push their modified adjusted gross income past an IRMAA threshold and pay higher Medicare premiums starting at 65. But if they pull too little, they miss a valuable window for Roth conversions that could save them significantly in taxes over the next two decades.

Coordinating all of that, year by year, account by account, with tax brackets and Medicare cliffs shifting in the background, is the job. An accumulation-focused advisor was never trained for it, because their clients never needed it before.

The Specialist vs. Generalist Problem

Think of it this way. If you’ve been seeing a primary care physician for 20 years and you develop a heart condition, your doctor doesn’t become a cardiologist just because you’ve been a loyal patient. They refer you to someone with specific training in the thing you now need.

Financial planning works the same way. The American College study found that advisors report offering an average of five out of eight major planning services. When asked to identify their top three, the most common answers were general financial planning (69%), retirement income planning (66%), and portfolio management (54%). That’s a lot of advisors claiming retirement income planning as a core offering. But the Expertise Index data shows that the claim and the capability don’t always match.

The study also found a strong link between expertise and the types of clients advisors serve. Across all categories, advisors scoring at the advanced level were more likely to work with high-net-worth clients holding at least $500,000 in investable assets. In tax planning, the gap was especially striking: advisors with advanced tax expertise reported that roughly 75% of their clients were high-net-worth, compared to just 35% for those delivering tax planning at a basic level.

That’s not a coincidence. High-net-worth clients tend to seek out, and can afford to retain, specialists. But even if you’re not in that wealth tier, the complexity of retirement income planning doesn’t scale down. A retiree with $800,000 faces the same withdrawal sequencing questions, the same IRMAA cliffs, and the same Social Security timing decisions as someone with $3 million. The stakes per dollar are actually higher.

The challenge for most pre-retirees is that the financial services industry doesn’t make it easy to distinguish between a generalist who checks the retirement planning box and a specialist who spends most of their time solving distribution problems. Anyone can call themselves a financial advisor or financial planner. There’s no licensing requirement for the title itself. And many advisory firms market retirement planning as a core offering without verifying that their advisors have advanced training in the subject.

What Accumulation Advisors and Distribution Specialists Actually Do

The table below illustrates how the day-to-day focus differs between an advisor built for the saving years and one focused on the spending years. Most generalist advisors live on the left side. If your needs are shifting to the right side and your advisor hasn’t shifted with you, that’s worth a conversation.

Seven Questions to Test Your Advisor’s Distribution Expertise

You don’t need to fire your advisor to find out whether they’re the right person for the next chapter. You do need to ask specific questions and listen carefully to what you get back. Vague answers are information. So are confident, detailed ones.

The key is specificity. General questions get general answers. If you ask “are you good at retirement planning?” every advisor in the country will say yes. But if you ask how they’d handle a Roth conversion in a year when your income drops before RMDs kick in, the difference between a specialist and a generalist becomes obvious in about thirty seconds.

1. What percentage of your current clients are actively retired and drawing income from their portfolios?
2. Walk me through how you’d build a withdrawal sequence across my taxable, tax-deferred, and Roth accounts for the first five years of retirement.
3. How would you approach Social Security timing for both me and my spouse, factoring in taxes, survivor benefits, and our other income sources?
4. What’s your strategy for managing sequence-of-returns risk in the first three to five years after I stop working?
5. Have you modeled Roth conversion scenarios for clients in my tax bracket, and can you show me how those projections are built?
6. How do you handle IRMAA planning to avoid Medicare premium surcharges during the transition to retirement?
7. What retirement-specific credentials or continuing education have you completed in the last three years?

The American College study found that advisors holding the Retirement Income Certified Professional (RICP) designation were 16 percentage points more likely to demonstrate advanced retirement income expertise than those without it (56% vs. 40%). That’s not the only credential worth asking about, but it tells you something about what focused training can mean.

Red Flags That Your Advisor Hasn’t Made the Shift

Some signs are subtle. Others aren’t. If you recognize several of these in your current relationship, it may be time to get a second opinion.

• Your advisor talks about portfolio returns but has never modeled a withdrawal sequence or projected your retirement income year by year.
• Social Security comes up only as a “claim it when you’re ready” topic, with no analysis of optimal timing, spousal coordination, or tax impact.
• Roth conversions have never been discussed, even though you have significant pre-tax IRA or 401(k) balances and a window of lower-income years before RMDs begin.
• You’ve never heard the terms “IRMAA,” “provisional income,” or “tax torpedo” in any planning conversation.
• Your annual review focuses almost entirely on investment performance rather than income sustainability, tax positioning, or healthcare cost projections.
• You only hear from your advisor when they want to execute a buy or sell order on your portfolio.
• When you ask about retirement-specific topics, the answer is “talk to your CPA” or “we’ll figure that out when the time comes.”

The Bottom Line

Loyalty to a long-time advisor is understandable. You’ve built a relationship. They know your history. Switching feels disruptive. But retirement is not a continuation of what came before. It’s a structural change in how your money works, and it requires a different set of skills than the ones that helped you build your portfolio in the first place.

The American College study makes that point with data: experience alone doesn’t predict expertise, and most advisors offering retirement income planning aren’t delivering it at the level retirees need. That’s not an indictment of the profession. It’s a call to ask better questions.

A second opinion doesn’t have to be confrontational. Many fee-only advisors offer initial consultations, and a retirement income stress test from a specialist can reveal gaps your current advisor may not be equipped to see. If your advisor is the right fit, the second opinion will confirm it, and you’ll move forward with more confidence. If they’re not, you’ll be glad you found out now rather than five years into retirement with a plan that was never really built for the job.

You don’t have to leave your advisor to get a second opinion. But you do owe it to yourself, and to the retirement you’ve spent decades working toward, to find out whether the person guiding your financial life has the specific skills this chapter demands. The questions above will give you a clear picture. What you do with the answers is up to you.

This content is for informational purposes only and does not constitute financial, tax, or legal advice. Consult a qualified fiduciary advisor before making significant financial decisions.