Before you sign anything.
A second opinion on the financial advice you are being given — from someone who has nothing to sell you
When the phone starts ringing
Certain seasons of life invite certain kinds of advice. A spouse dies, and the phone begins ringing with condolences from financial professionals. A marriage ends, and someone suggests you roll your settlement into a managed account before you have finished grieving. A business you spent thirty years building finally sells, and within weeks someone is explaining an annuity that guarantees income for life. An inheritance lands, and three different family members tell you three different things to do with it.
What these moments share is urgency. People around you — often with good intentions, sometimes without, begin asking you to make permanent decisions at the moment you are least equipped to make them.
What the research says
This pattern is well documented. Roughly 80% of widows leave their financial advisor within a year of their husband's death — not because markets moved against them, but because the relationship was never really theirs, and because someone began selling to them the week the funeral ended. Divorced women report the same thing. People who inherit suddenly describe a flood of advice from professionals who benefit from their decisions.
Mainstream financial-education sources — the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, FINRA, Britannica Money — publicly warn the recently widowed about high-pressure product sales. Several of them specifically recommend getting a second opinion before signing any annuity, long-term care policy, or other expensive financial product being sold during grief.
The question is where that second opinion is supposed to come from. The industry is organized around selling things. Most second opinions arrive from someone who happens to have a slightly different product to pitch.
What a Second Opinion looks like
Before we meet, you send over whatever documents define the question. During the session, we work through the paperwork line by line. We identify what requires action soon, what can wait, what the real cost of the commitment is, what questions you should be asking the person who presented it to you, and what you should be clear about before you sign anything. You leave with a written summary of what we discussed.
If you want to continue the relationship through Ongoing Clarity, that path exists. Sometimes one conversation is all it takes — and that's enough.
A second opinion that isn't selling something else
Clear View Financial exists for exactly this moment. Kevin Dingle, the founder, is a financial clarity coach. He does not sell insurance, annuities, or managed investment products. He is not paid more if you buy one thing over another, because he is not paid for that at all. He is paid a flat fee for the time you spend with him — nothing beyond it.
Bring the contract. Bring the proposal. Bring the statements, the spreadsheet your brother-in-law sent you, the business-sale paperwork you do not fully understand. In ninety minutes, we go through what the document actually says — the fees, the commitments, the language that matters, the language that is missing — so you can walk into your next conversation knowing exactly what you are being asked to agree to.
If you are not sure you need it
Most people who book The Second Opinion do so because something they are being asked to sign does not sit right. That instinct is almost always worth listening to.
The cost of the session is $397. The cost of signing something you did not fully understand during the hardest year of your life can be considerably more than that.
If you are not ready to commit to the full session, the first conversation is free. Thirty minutes, no presentation, no pitch. If your instinct about what is in front of you is correct, you will usually know within twenty of those thirty minutes.
All conversations are confidential, no information is shared with any outside party.