Close.

Richard — an AI CFO for your household

A company closes
its books every month.
Your household
never has.

Richard connects to your accounts, closes the balance sheet every month, and opens with what actually moved.
Not a dashboard you maintain. A CFO who reports to you.

Start with Richard — $100/mo See the monthly close

By Michael Ashley — banking and asset management, 20+ years

The monthly close

One loop, run every month, on your real numbers.

Close

Richard assembles the balance sheet from every account you connect — banks, brokerages, retirement, property, debt, private holdings — and reconciles it against last month.

Outcome: one current picture, not twelve logins.

Review

A standing pass across the seven domains of a real financial plan: cash and liquidity, debt, investments, property, tax, protection, estate. Every finding quantified in dollars.

Outcome: what changed, and what it cost you.

Briefing

Richard leads with the findings that moved, ranked, in plain language — idle cash earning nothing, a fee you are quietly paying, a position that drifted past its mandate.

Outcome: a short read. Then you decide.

$100/month. Richard reads and recommends. He never moves money, places a trade, or holds your assets — the decision is always yours to make and yours to execute.

Who it's for

Complexity, not just size.

Richard is built for the household whose money outgrew consumer tools but does not warrant a family office. The tell is not a number — it is how many moving parts you are tracking in your head:

Income that is lumpy or arrives from more than one place
A business that pays out to personal
Property beyond the house you live in
Net worth spread across institutions that do not talk to each other
Dependents, and the paperwork that comes with them

If your whole financial life is one brokerage account, you do not need Richard. The free Frame below is enough.

Free — the Five Fund Frame

Five jobs. Five funds. One complete portfolio.

Before Richard there was the Frame, and it is still here, still free. Each slot does one thing: pick the best fund for that job and leave it alone. It is how Richard reasons about portfolio structure — one module inside a much wider review, and the part you can use today without connecting anything.

Slot 01

Park

Money you might need tomorrow.

Default: SGOV

Slot 02

Earn

Money that pays you while you wait.

Default: SCHD

Slot 03

Build

Money that builds wealth for future-you.

Default: VOO

Slot 04

Roam

Money that doesn't bet everything on one country.

Default: VXUS

Slot 05

Dare

Money you can afford to lose on something you believe in.

Default: Your pick

One fund per job. That's the portfolio.

The Bogleheads portfolio tells you to hold stocks, bonds, and international.
Richiest agrees — and adds two things the orthodoxy ignores: a proper cash position, and a legitimized slot for the bet you were going to make anyway.

What the Bogleheads get right

Diversified index investing beats most active management over time. Low costs matter enormously. The Frame is built on these foundations.

What the Frame adds

A dedicated Park slot because "invest everything" is bad advice when rent is due. A Dare slot because pretending investors won't take high-conviction bets doesn't stop them — it just means they do it without a framework.

The Frame respects the Bogleheads core — and adds what it leaves out.

How it works

Three steps. Then stop touching it.

Pick your life stage

The Frame allocates differently depending on where you are. In your 20s, Build gets 55% — you have time on your side. In your 60s, Earn gets 40% — your portfolio should be paying you. The Build Your Frame tool handles the math.

Outcome: your target allocation.

Pick one fund per slot

Each slot has a Pareto pick — the fund that wins its job for most investors. SGOV, SCHD, VOO, VXUS. Dare is yours to choose. Read the analysis if you want reasoning. Or just use the defaults.

Outcome: five funds, one portfolio.

Rebalance once a year

Set recurring investments proportional to your targets. Check once a year for drift greater than 5–10 percentage points. Rebalance if needed. That's the whole system.

Outcome: done. Leave it alone.

Set it up in minutes. Check once a year. That's the entire system.

Suggested allocations

The numbers shift as life does.

Life stage	Park	Earn	Build	Roam	Dare
20s	5%	10%	55%	20%	10%
30s	10%	15%	45%	20%	10%
40s	10%	25%	35%	20%	10%
50s	15%	30%	30%	20%	5%
60s+	20%	40%	20%	15%	5%

Starting points, not personalized advice. Adjust to your income, timeline, and risk tolerance.

The logic behind the shift

Early on, Build dominates because compounding needs time. A 25-year-old investing $500 a month in VOO for 35 years has decades of market returns working for them.

As retirement approaches, sequence-of-returns risk becomes real — a bad market in the first three years of retirement can permanently impair an all-equity portfolio. Earn's growing income reduces the need to sell Build at unfavorable prices. Park ensures there's always dry powder.

The Dare slot never exceeds 10% at any life stage. It's the boundary between a high-conviction bet and a portfolio-altering gamble.

Find your allocation →

Build is always the engine. Everything else supports it.

How the Frame compares

Good portfolios are not mysterious. The problem is that most alternatives hide the tradeoffs.

Three other approaches. One honest comparison.

The Bogleheads 3-Fund

Stocks, bonds, international. Simple and mostly right.

The three-fund portfolio is the gold standard for a reason. Low cost, diversified, easy to maintain. The Frame agrees with the core insight and diverges on two points: T-bills are safer than bonds and currently yield more, and the absence of a structured high-risk slot.

Robo-advisors

Answer 15 questions. Get a portfolio you don't understand.

Robo-advisors automate good behavior — regular investing, rebalancing, tax-loss harvesting. The downside: they build portfolios opaque enough that most investors don't understand what they own or why. The Frame is transparent by design. Five funds, five jobs, explainable to anyone.

Stock picking

Most people underperform the index they're trying to beat.

Stock picking is not wrong — it's just hard. The research on individual stock selection versus index funds is clear: most active strategies underperform their benchmarks over 10+ years, net of costs and taxes. The Frame gives you index exposure plus a legitimate outlet for conviction plays in the Dare slot.

Every alternative has merit. The Frame makes the tradeoffs visible instead of hidden.

Start with the most common questions first, then drill into the category sections below.