The DIY Investor Who Finally Got Everything in One Room
She managed her own portfolio for fifteen years. Did well, honestly.
Vanguard index funds with low fees and a decent allocation. She read the books, understood the principles and certainly wasn't wrong but incomplete.
When she came to us, she had three separate problems she didn't know were connected.
Three Professionals. Zero Coordination.
Taxes were done by a national chain accurately, but passively. Every April, someone entered the numbers and filed the return and nobody was looking ahead. Nobody was asking what could be different by December 31st. The tax return was a report card, not a strategy.
Her estate documents were a will she printed off the internet in 2019 and never properly executed. There wasn’t a trust and beneficiary designations were missing or mismatched with her will. There wasn’t a medical directive or a power of attorney on file either, so nothing would dictate the care she wanted to receive.
The investments technically "managed" by a robo-advisor that had no idea her income had changed, that her kids were grown, that she was five years from retirement, or that the allocation it built for her in 2018 no longer fit the person she'd become.
There were three separate services, technically all completed in isolation, that didn’t create a cohesive story and all contradicted each other. Sometimes this happens with professionals too. Why do we have a CPA, a CFP® Professional, and an attorney rather than one place that can handle all three?
This is not unusual. It is, in fact, the default.
What Integration Actually Looks Like
Here's what we did.
We brought her tax preparation in-house. Not just filing but with extensive planning. We looked at her bracket, business income, retirement account structure, and built a strategy around what was possible before December 31st, not what was reportable after April 15th. The difference between reactive tax preparation and proactive tax planning, compounded over a decade, is significant. For someone in her situation, it was material immediately.
We addressed her estate documents within two weeks. We use Trust & Will, a platform that delivers attorney-quality estate documents directly, without the $3,000–$5,000 law firm retainer most people budget for and then quietly never get around to paying. She left with a revocable living trust, updated and coordinated beneficiary designations, powers of attorney documents, a will, and a healthcare directive that actually reflected his wishes. For the first time, her estate matched her intentions.
We moved the investments to Altruist, where her portfolio now runs on a personalized model built around her actual situation, not a risk questionnaire he filled out in 2011. All tax aware with drift-based rebalancing to remove the advisor contact or human error bias. She doesn’t have to worry about cash not being invested any longer either, Altruist automatically grabs the excess cash and invests it according to how she wanted. The allocation reflects her timeline, income needs, and values. It knows who she is now, not just who she was seven years ago.
Three parts of her financial life, finally in the same room talking to each other.
The DIY Investor Isn't Wrong
She's right to want low fees and transparency with an allocation she can understand and explain. The discipline it takes to stay invested through a volatile year, to resist the urge to chase performance, to keep costs low is the elusive part that most DIY investors have a difficult time mastering.
What the DIY investor is missing is usually a combination of discipline/accountability and integration.
The tax return and the investment account have to talk to each other. A Roth conversion that makes sense in isolation might be a mistake in the context of the full income picture. A capital gain that seems unavoidable often isn't, if someone is watching the portfolio with tax efficiency in mind. The cash sitting in a savings account at 0.4% while the portfolio is being optimized for yield is a coordination failure, not a portfolio decision.
The estate plan has to reflect the financial plan. A trust that doesn't match the beneficiary designations on the retirement account accomplishes nothing at the moment it matters most. The healthcare directive that sits unsigned in a drawer is worse than not having one and it creates the false assurance of preparation without the protection.
Cash management can't be an afterthought. Where you hold your cash, what it earns, how it interacts with your investment strategy and your tax situation — these decisions compound quietly in either direction.
None of this requires handing over control and the DIY investor has built something real. She doesn't need to start over but she does need the parts to connect.
Why Integritas is a fit for this person
Most financial firms are built around one thing, usually the investment account. Everything else is an add-on, a referral out, or a polite acknowledgment that taxes are complicated and you should probably talk to someone about that.
We built Integritas around the opposite idea: that the investment account is one piece of a larger picture, and that the picture only makes sense when all the pieces are in the same frame.
As a CFP® and Enrolled Agent, Daniel can prepare your taxes, represent you before the IRS, manage your investments, and build the financial plan that connects them all in one relationship, under one roof, with one person who knows the full story.
That's not a pitch. It's a structural difference.
"For which of you, intending to build a tower, does not first sit down and estimate the cost, to see whether he has enough to complete it?"
— Luke 14:28
The DIY investor built the foundation. She did it carefully, and it's solid. What we offer isn't a replacement for what she built. It's the integration that lets her finish the tower.
If your financial life feels like three separate conversations that have never met, we'd like to be the room where they finally do.
Book a free 20-minute conversation →
Integritas Wealth Strategies LLC is a registered investment adviser in South Carolina and Georgia. This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment, tax, or legal advice. Trust & Will is a third-party platform; Integritas does not receive compensation for referrals.