Moisand Fitzgerald Tamayo And The Advisor Ranking Signal

I still remember the afternoon a neighbor slid a printed statement across the kitchen table and asked, almost apologetically, whether the firm named at the top was “actually any good.” The numbers looked tidy. The logo looked expensive. None of that answered the question he was really asking, which was whether a stranger in another city would still care about his mother’s long-term care bill five years from now. Rankings make that conversation feel simpler than it is. A spot on a national list is a signal, not a verdict, and the signal only helps if you know what the judges were weighing and what they almost certainly left out.

Moisand Fitzgerald Tamayo, the Orlando practice led by Dan Moisand, Charlie Fitzgerald, and Ron Tamayo, sits at No. 44 on this year’s widely watched ranking of advisory firms. The firm reports about $1.5 billion in assets under management, 5,305 accounts, 28 years in business, a $100,000 minimum, offices in Florida, and a willingness to take clients in all 50 states. Those figures are concrete. What they mean for a household is a longer story.

What A National Ranking Actually Tells You About An Advisory Firm

Lists like this one are built to do more than sort firms by size. The public description of the ranking says it weighs a mix of factors beyond assets under management, with an eye toward firms that help clients move through an entire financial life. That phrasing matters. A pure asset ranking would reward the biggest balance sheets and stop there. A broader score tries, at least on paper, to notice planning depth, client breadth, and staying power.

I have found that people still read the number first and the methodology second, if they read the methodology at all. Forty-four out of one hundred sounds like a medal. It is closer to a shortlist. Ninety-nine other firms made the same cut. Plenty of careful practices never appear on any list, because they are small, private, or simply uninterested in the paperwork. A missing name is not a red flag. A present name is not a guarantee.

Still, landing inside the top half of a national field is not nothing. It suggests the firm cleared screens that many shops never face: tenure, scale, client count, and some version of planning capability. For a household comparing three or four finalists, that is a useful filter. It is a poor substitute for the conversation you should have before you move a retirement account.

The Orlando Practice Behind The Number

The firm is based at Bank of America Plaza, 300 South Orange Avenue, Suite 1170, in Orlando, with a main line at (407) 869-6228. Leadership is listed as Dan Moisand and Charlie Fitzgerald as directors, and Ron Tamayo as principal. Twenty-eight years in business puts the founding era in the late 1990s, which means the practice has already lived through the dot-com bust, the financial crisis, a long bull market, a pandemic shock, and the inflation spike that followed. Survival is not the same as skill. It does mean the operating habits were stress-tested more than once.

Orlando is an easy city to underestimate in wealth management. People picture theme parks and forget the retirees, the medical corridor, the transplants who sold a house up north, and the business owners who stayed. A firm that has spent nearly three decades in that mix tends to see a particular kind of client: someone who arrived with a 401(k), a paid-off house, and a vague fear of outliving the money. That is a different book of business from a Wall Street desk chasing institutional mandates.

The public profile describes a wide variety of clients with planning needs that stretch across generations. That sentence is easy to skim. It is also the part I would circle. Multi-generational work is where advisory firms either earn their fee or reveal that they are mostly a portfolio shop with a brochure.

Scale Without Losing The Household Conversation

$1.5 billion is real money. It is not a mega-custodian, and it is not a two-person office either. Split across 5,305 accounts, the average account sits somewhere near the high five figures to low six figures, depending on how concentrated the largest relationships are. Averages lie, of course. A handful of large families can pull the mean up while most accounts sit closer to the minimum. Even so, the ratio tells you something. This is not a firm built only on a dozen ultra-wealthy principals.

Account count is the quieter number, and in my experience it is the more honest one. Assets can balloon in a bull market without the firm adding a single new planning relationship. Accounts mean people, or at least registrations: IRAs, joint brokerage accounts, trusts, maybe a 529. Five thousand of them implies a service model that has to scale. Phone trees, client portals, associate advisors, scheduled reviews. If you want a partner who answers the cell phone on a Sunday, a firm of this size may not be that shop. If you want a bench that does not vanish when one advisor retires, size starts to look like a feature.

A ranking rewards the firm. The relationship still has to survive a bad quarter, a health scare, and the year your adult child asks for a loan.

Perhaps the most interesting tension in a practice this size is attention. Partners cannot sit in every meeting. The question is whether the people who do sit in the meeting are trained, supervised, and still connected to the investment and planning philosophy the founders put their names on. Ask who will actually be on your calls in year three. The answer is more useful than the ranking.

Why A Six-Figure Minimum Changes The Relationship

The stated minimum asset threshold is $100,000. That number draws a line. Below it, many full-service firms will refer you elsewhere or offer a lighter digital service. Above it, you are inside the model they built their staffing around. A threshold is not a moral judgment. It is economics. Advice that includes tax coordination, retirement income design, and estate conversations costs more to deliver than a model portfolio and a quarterly PDF.

Households just over the line should be clear-eyed. You may be a smaller relationship inside a book that also holds much larger ones. That does not mean you get worse investments. It can mean review meetings are shorter, and complex projects wait their turn. Households far above the line should ask the opposite question: are you large enough, relative to the firm, that your preferences actually shape the portfolio, or are you slotted into a house model with modest tilts?

Neither answer is automatically bad. A disciplined house model can protect you from a clever idea that ages poorly. A custom portfolio can fit a concentrated stock position or a pension most models ignore. The mistake is assuming the ranking settled the question.

Reading Assets And Accounts Side By Side

People love a single score. Firms are messier. Here is a plain way to hold the two headline figures together without pretending they tell the whole story.

I keep coming back to that last row. Accepting clients everywhere is a regulatory and operational choice, not a promise that Orlando feels close when you live in Oregon. Video reviews can be excellent. They can also become a slide deck and a clock. If most of your financial life is local, taxes, a property, a parent nearby, ask how the firm coordinates with the professionals you already trust.

Multi-Generational Planning In Plain Language

The profile highlights clients whose needs run across generations. Strip the brochure tone off that idea and you get a short list of problems that actually show up in kitchens.

• A couple in their sixties deciding how much to spend so a surviving spouse is not stranded.
• Adult children who will inherit both the assets and the confusion about how those assets were invested.
• A parent whose capacity is fading, and a family that has not named who can act.
• A business interest that is the largest asset and the least liquid one.
• Grandchildren whose education funding competes with the grandparents’ own care costs.

None of those problems is solved by a ranking. They are solved, imperfectly, by documents, beneficiary designations, a spending rule you can live with, and someone who will say no when a relative wants to raid the account. Firms that advertise breadth across generations are at least claiming they do this work. Your job is to test the claim with a scenario, not a slogan.

Try this in the first meeting. Describe a plausible bad year: a market drop, a medical bill, and a child who needs help with a house. Ask what the firm would change, what it would refuse to change, and who calls whom. The quality of the answer tells you more than No. 44 ever will.

What Twenty-Eight Years Tends To Reveal

Tenure is fashionable to dismiss. “Past longevity is not future care,” people say, and they are right in the narrow sense. Advisors retire. Firms merge. Cultures drift. Even so, nearly three decades is a filter. Practices that blow up on concentration, on sloppy compliance, or on a single rainmaker usually do not reach year twenty-eight with their names still on the door.

Dan Moisand, Charlie Fitzgerald, and Ron Tamayo are the names attached to leadership in the public listing. Named principals are a feature when you are trying to understand accountability. They are also a succession question. Who owns the client relationship if one of them steps back? Is there a next generation of advisors already in the meetings, or does the firm still orbit the founders? I would rather hear an awkward honest answer than a polished one.

Markets have a way of exposing philosophy. A firm that has been through 2000, 2008, and 2020 has had chances to abandon a process under pressure. Whether it did is not something a list can see. Old client letters, investment policy statements, and the way the team talks about losses are better evidence. If every sentence is about upside, keep looking.

Florida Offices And A National Client Map

Physical offices in Florida, clients accepted in every state. That combination fits the way American retirement actually works. People earn in one region and land in another. Snowbirds keep a tax residency question alive for years. Adult children stay where the jobs are. A firm that can paper accounts across state lines saves a certain kind of family from splitting advice three ways.

It also creates a coordination burden. State tax rules are not a footnote if you are weighing a move. Property, inheritance formalities, and Medicaid look-back rules do not care that your advisor is excellent at portfolio construction. The useful firms either know the local edges or know when to bring in a specialist and stay in the room. Ask which pattern this practice uses. Both can work. Silence is the warning.

Orlando as a base has a practical upside people forget. Time zone overlap with most of the country is decent. Travel in for an annual review is straightforward if you already visit Florida. For clients who will never visit, the office is mostly a compliance address and a place the staff sits. That is fine, as long as you are hiring the process and not the skyline.

Fees, Duty, And The Quiet Stuff Rankings Miss

A national list can note that a firm helps clients through a financial life. It cannot sit in your review and hear whether the advisor interrupts you. It cannot see the invoice. It cannot tell you whether the firm is a fiduciary for the accounts you care about, all the time, or only in some wrappers. Those distinctions sound technical until they show up as a product you did not need.

Before you treat a ranking as a green light, get the boring documents. The form that discloses services, fees, conflicts, and disciplinary history is public for registered advisers. Read the fee schedule twice. Asset-based fees feel painless until you multiply them by a decade of compounding you did not receive. Flat fees and project fees have their own traps, especially if trading and custody sit elsewhere and nobody owns the whole picture.

I am wary of any firm, ranked or not, that cannot explain its conflicts in a sentence a tired person can follow. Custody at a large independent custodian, a clear fee, and a written investment policy are not glamorous. They are the floor. Ranking well does not raise the floor by itself.

A simple screen before you move money:
  1. Who has custody of the assets?
  2. How is the firm paid, in dollars, on your balance?
  3. What conflicts are disclosed, and which ones touch you?
  4. Who is the backup if your lead advisor leaves?
  5. What does the firm refuse to do?

Retirement Income Is Where Advice Gets Real

Most people do not hire an advisor to beat a benchmark by a fraction. They hire one because the paycheck stopped, or will stop, and the statement suddenly has to behave like a salary. That shift is where a planning-oriented firm either justifies itself or becomes an expensive newsletter.

A workable retirement income design usually touches four levers, and they argue with each other. Spending rate. Social Security timing. Tax location of withdrawals. The risk mix once you are no longer adding savings every month. Pull too much early and a bad sequence of returns does quiet damage that a later bull market may not repair. Delay every pleasure and you risk dying with a perfect spreadsheet. Good advisors talk about that trade in numbers you recognize, not in jargon.

Moisand Fitzgerald Tamayo’s public profile does not hand you a model withdrawal rate, and it should not. Households are not identical. What you can reasonably expect from a firm that emphasizes life-stage planning is a process: a cash bucket or bond ladder for near-term spending, a growth sleeve for the years you will still be alive in your eighties, and a tax map that does not accidentally push you into a higher bracket because someone sold the wrong lot in December.

Recent planning research, the kind that follows retirees rather than backtests, keeps landing on the same uncomfortable point. The order of returns in the first decade of retirement matters more than the average return over thirty years. If a firm cannot explain sequence risk without a slide full of Greek letters, keep asking until they can. Or leave. Clarity is part of the service.

Tax Planning Without The Theater

Tax work is where ranked firms sometimes overpromise. An advisor is not your CPA unless they are, and even then the roles should be distinct. The useful version of tax-aware advice is humbler. Asset location. Roth conversion windows. Charitable bunching when it actually beats the standard deduction. Harvesting losses without tripping wash-sale rules you forgot about in another account. Coordinating with the person who signs your return.

Florida’s lack of a state income tax is a quiet advantage for residents, and a trap for people who assume it solves everything. Federal brackets still exist. IRMAA still exists. Capital gains still exist. A move into the state does not erase a concentrated position you built elsewhere. Firms that serve both Florida households and clients in high-tax states should be able to say, plainly, which parts of the plan change when residency changes. If the answer is “the portfolio stays the same,” that may be correct for the investments and incomplete for the withdrawals.

Ask for an example, anonymized, of a conversion or a gain-realization decision the firm talked a client out of. The stories about restraint are more informative than the stories about cleverness.

Estate Planning Is Mostly Coordination

Advisors do not replace estate attorneys. The good ones notice when the will, the trust, and the beneficiary forms disagree, which happens more often than families admit. A ranking that praises life-stage help is, in part, praising this unglamorous cross-check. Titles on accounts override beautiful documents. I have watched families discover that the hard way, and it is a miserable meeting.

If multi-generational work is part of the pitch, test it. Who is invited to the meeting when you want adult children in the loop? Is there a continuity plan so a surviving spouse is not meeting a stranger? Are charitable intentions written down, or are they a comment you made once? These are not trick questions. They are the job.

1. Confirm every beneficiary form matches the current intent, not the intent from a prior marriage.
2. Name who can speak to the advisor if you cannot.
3. Separate what should pass by title from what should pass by will or trust.
4. Decide what your children are allowed to know now, and what waits.
5. Revisit the plan after any move, marriage, death, or large liquidity event.

A firm with thousands of accounts has seen versions of all five. That experience is an asset only if it reaches your file. Experience sitting in a partner’s head does not help you.

Portfolio Design And The Temptation To Sound Clever

Investment counsel is in the firm’s broader description of what ranked practices do, and the name itself signals that portfolios are not an afterthought. Still, the industry has a habit of selling complexity as care. More funds. More alternatives. A private vehicle you cannot price on a Tuesday. Sometimes those tools fit. Often they fit the firm’s story better than your timeline.

A sensible design for a household near or in retirement is usually boring on purpose. Broad equity exposure for the money you will not touch for a decade. High-quality bonds or cash-like reserves for the money you will. Costs you can point to. Rebalancing rules written before the market makes you emotional. Tilts, if any, that you could explain to a skeptical sibling.

According to long-running investor studies, the gap between a fund’s return and the return investors actually earn often comes from timing, not from the fund. Behavior is the leak. An advisor’s quiet value is sometimes just staying off the ledge in October. You cannot rank that easily, which is why lists feel cleaner than the work.

When you interview, ask what the firm will not buy. Constraints reveal philosophy faster than a performance sheet. A practice that has been around since the late 1990s has had every chance to chase a fad. Whether it did is a fair question.

Risk Tolerance Is A Conversation, Not A Quiz

Most onboarding includes a questionnaire. People click “moderate” because it sounds adult. Then a real decline arrives and moderate turns out to have meant something else. I have sat through enough of these to distrust the form more than the advisor who throws the form out and asks what you did in the last selloff.

Risk is not one dial. There is the risk of a falling statement. There is the risk of inflation eating a too-safe portfolio. There is the risk of a concentrated employer stock. There is the risk that a spouse who has never managed the money inherits a strategy they do not understand. A firm serving multiple generations should be able to hold those risks in the same meeting without turning it into a product pitch.

Write down the loss, in dollars, that would make you call and demand a change. Then ask the advisor what they would say. If the answer is only “stay the course,” you have learned their temperament. If the answer is a specific rule already in the policy statement, you have learned their process. Prefer the second, with a human still attached.

How To Use A Ranking Without Outsourcing Your Judgment

Treat No. 44 as a reason to put the firm on a short list, not as a reason to transfer assets on a Thursday. The public facts worth keeping in view are straightforward. Orlando base. Florida offices. Clients in all states. About $1.5 billion. 5,305 accounts. Twenty-eight years. A $100,000 minimum. Named leadership. A claim of broad, multi-generational planning. That is enough to justify a meeting. It is not enough to justify a signature.

Build the meeting around your life, not their awards. Bring the Social Security estimate, the pension booklet if you have one, a rough spending number, and the account list. Ask them to sketch the first year, including what they would not touch. Good planners get specific. Weak ones stay in the clouds and circle back to the ranking.

The best advisory relationships feel slightly boring in calm markets and unusually clear in rough ones.

– A planning principle worth testing in the first meeting

Compare at least one other firm that did not make the list, if you can. The contrast keeps you from treating a leaderboard as a personality. You may still choose the ranked practice. You will know why.

Questions Worth Asking Before You Move A Retirement Account

Steal these. They are not clever, which is the point.

• Who will be in my reviews in two years, and what happens if that person leaves?
• How are you paid on my accounts, in percent and in estimated dollars?
• Where are the assets custodied, and can I see them without calling you?
• What did you change for clients in the last sharp decline, and what did you refuse to change?
• How do you work with my tax preparer and, if I have one, my estate attorney?
• What is your process for a surviving spouse who has not been the financial lead?
• Which services are included in the advisory fee, and which are billed separately?
• What kinds of clients do you turn away, even above the minimum?

Listen for pauses. A polished firm can answer all eight smoothly and still be wrong for you. A thoughtful firm might stumble on one and recover with a concrete example. I trust the stumble more, within reason. Scripted perfection often means you are hearing marketing, not judgment.

Where A Minimum Helps And Where It Hides

$100,000 keeps the book from filling with accounts the firm cannot afford to serve well. That protects you if you are above the line, because the staff is not drowning in relationships that do not pay for a review. It also hides a selection effect. The clients who shaped the firm’s habits already had some savings discipline. Advice that works for them may assume a cushion you do not have, or a pension you do.

If you are consolidating old plans to cross the threshold, say so. Rollovers have their own pitfalls, especially when a workplace plan offers a stable value fund or low institutional pricing you will not see outside. A fiduciary-minded advisor should be willing to tell you to leave an account where it is. That sentence is worth more than a plaque.

Couples should do the math together. One spouse’s inherited IRA can clear the minimum while the household’s real spending problem sits in a different account. Firms that think in households, not registrations, are the ones the multi-generational claim is pointing at. Make them prove they think that way.

The Service Model You Are Actually Buying

At a few thousand accounts, intimacy is designed, not accidental. You might get a lead advisor, a planning associate, and a service team that handles transfers. That structure can be excellent. It can also feel like a bank if nobody owns the relationship. Ask for the org chart in human terms. Who drafts the plan. Who places trades. Who calls when a check is requested. Who you email when you are annoyed.

Meeting rhythm matters more than people admit. An annual review with silence in between is a light service wearing a heavy fee. Quarterly touches, even short ones, catch the life events that wreck a plan: a job change, a parent moving in, a divorce you have not announced yet. You do not need constant contact. You need a cadence that matches how fast your life actually changes.

Technology is part of the model now, whether the firm brags about it or not. Secure upload, beneficiary views, performance that you can reconcile to the custodian. If the portal is an afterthought, the back office may be too. Click around during the pitch. A ranking will not mention a clunky login. You will live with it.

Conflicts That Do Not Show Up In A Top-100 Blurb

Every advisory firm has conflicts. Revenue rises when assets rise, so there is a gentle incentive to gather more and distribute less. Some firms also earn from products, referrals, or in-house funds. None of that is automatically disqualifying. Undisclosed or mumbled conflicts are. The public ranking is not your disclosure document. The firm’s own filing is.

Referral arrangements deserve a direct question. If an attorney or accountant sent you, ask whether money moves back the other way. If the firm sends you to an insurance specialist, ask the same. Transparency does not remove the conflict. It lets you price it.

I would rather hire a firm that names its incentives in the first meeting than one that waits for the appendix. Ranked practices are not immune to soft selling. They are sometimes better at it.

A Household Checklist You Can Finish In An Evening

If the ranking sent you here, finish the homework the list cannot do for you. Block an hour. No heroics.

1. List every account, the title, and the beneficiary. Note mismatches.
2. Write a one-year spending number and a bad-year spending number.
3. Pull the firm’s disclosure and circle the fee and the conflicts.
4. Decide whether remote service is acceptable, or whether you need a local office you will actually visit.
5. Name the decision you want help with in the next twelve months. One decision. Not a life overhaul.
6. Interview two firms with the same packet of facts, so the comparison is fair.

Bring that packet to Orlando, or to the video call. A practice that has spent 28 years on planning work should be able to respond to a specific household, not only to a generic retiree. If the conversation stays generic, the ranking did its job as marketing and stopped there.

What No. 44 Is Allowed To Mean

It is allowed to mean the firm was visible enough, established enough, and broad enough to clear a national screen that looks past raw assets. It is allowed to mean Moisand Fitzgerald Tamayo belongs in a serious comparison set for households who meet the minimum and want planning that spans more than a model portfolio. It is allowed to mean the Orlando address is a real operating base, not a rented mailbox, and that the client map is not limited to one state.

It is not allowed to mean your returns will be better. It is not allowed to mean the fee is fair until you have seen it in dollars. It is not allowed to mean the advisor across the table will still be the right personality for your spouse. Those are local facts. Lists are national averages in disguise.

Perhaps that is the healthiest way to read any advisor ranking. Use it to shrink the map. Then do the unglamorous work the map cannot see: documents, incentives, succession, and the specific mess your family is actually in. Firms that welcome that work are the ones the planning language was describing. Firms that wave at the ranking and change the subject are telling you something too.

A Note On Fit, Not Fame

Fame in this industry is a strange currency. A mid-list national rank can impress a relative and still be irrelevant to your pension choices. Fit is quieter. Do they understand the account types you hold. Do they speak to both partners. Do they have a Florida footprint if Florida is part of your year, and a process if it is not. Can they work at the asset level you actually have, not the asset level in the advertisement.

Moisand Fitzgerald Tamayo’s published profile lines up with households that want a full-service relationship above $100,000, are comfortable with a Florida-based team, and expect advice that reaches past a single generation. If that is you, the ranking is a reasonable door. Walk through it with questions. If that is not you, the same ranking is a poor reason to contort your accounts until you qualify.

I keep thinking about my neighbor’s statement on the kitchen table. He did not need a leaderboard. He needed someone who would tell him, in a sentence, what the next year of his mother’s care would do to the portfolio, and what it would not do. Any firm that can answer that, ranked or not, is doing the job the list claims to celebrate. Start there. The number 44 can wait in the lobby.

Putting The Public Facts In One Place

For readers who want the snapshot without the commentary, the details released with the ranking are easy to line up. The firm is Moisand Fitzgerald Tamayo. The listed rank is 44. Assets under management are about $1.5 billion. Accounts under management are 5,305. Years in business are 28. The minimum asset threshold is $100,000. Clients are accepted in all 50 states. Physical offices are in Florida. The Orlando address given is Bank of America Plaza, 300 South Orange Avenue, Suite 1170, Orlando, FL 32801, and the phone number listed is (407) 869-6228. Leadership is identified as Dan Moisand, director, Charlie Fitzgerald, director, and Ron Tamayo, principal.

Those facts are a starting inventory. They describe reach, age, and scale. They do not describe your fee in dollars, your withdrawal plan, or the name of the person who will pick up when markets are ugly. Add those three, in writing, before you decide the ranking has done your choosing for you.

One last opinion, and then I will leave it. The households that get the most from a firm like this are rarely the ones chasing the highest rank on the page. They are the ones who arrive with a decision, a constraint, and the patience to hear a no. If you can be that client, a practice built over 28 years, with thousands of accounts and a stated focus on life-stage planning, is a credible place to have the conversation. If you need a trophy more than a process, any list will do, and none of them will help.