Henrico County · Virginia
Your Retirement Advisor in Richmond, VA
Richmond is a corporate town, and it shows up in the planning. The people we meet here spent twenty or thirty years at one of a handful of large employers, and they arrive with a deferred compensation plan, restricted stock, an old pension, and a 401(k) that has quietly become the largest asset they own. The complexity is rarely the amount — it is the number of moving parts.
Our Richmond office
3900 Westerre ParkwayRichmond, VA 23233
Meetings by appointment only.
Get directionsWho we work with here
What retirement looks like in Richmond
Our Richmond-area clients are usually senior individual contributors or managers within ten years of retiring, often with concentrated employer stock and a deferred comp election they have to make before they leave. The questions are about sequencing: what to exercise, what to roll, what to hold, and in what order.
The neighbourhoods we hear from most: Short Pump, Innsbrook, West End, Glen Allen.
Where the money comes from
The plans we see most in Richmond
Rolling out of an employer plan is the single most common reason someone calls us. These are the ones that come up here.
Dominion Energy
- 401(k)
- Pension
- Deferred compensation
Long-tenured employees frequently hold both a pension and a 401(k), plus company stock. The pension election and the stock concentration are two separate decisions people often make at the same time without meaning to.
Altria
- 401(k)
- Deferred compensation
Deferred compensation distribution elections are made years in advance and are difficult to change — the tax consequences land in retirement, not now.
Capital One
- 401(k)
- RSUs
- Deferred compensation
Equity compensation on a vesting schedule creates a concentration problem that resolves itself only if someone is deliberately managing it.
CarMax
- 401(k)
- Stock options
- RSUs
Option exercise timing is a tax decision as much as an investment one.
Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond
- Thrift plan
- Pension
A traditional pension plus a thrift plan is one of the more plannable combinations, provided the survivor election is modelled properly.
Markel and Genworth
- 401(k)
- Deferred compensation
Richmond's insurance sector produces a lot of long-tenure, plan-heavy retirements.
Virginia public-sector plans
- Virginia Retirement System (VRS)
- Which plan you're in changes your options at retirement more than most members realize — particularly the hybrid plan's defined-contribution component. Plans: Plan 1, Plan 2, Hybrid Retirement Plan.
- Optional Retirement Plan for Higher Education (ORP)
- Common at William & Mary and other Virginia public institutions. Unlike VRS, the balance is yours and portable. Plans: ORP Plan 1, ORP Plan 2.
Questions
Common questions from Richmond
On Westerre Parkway in Henrico's West End, minutes from Innsbrook and Short Pump. Meetings are by appointment, and virtual works just as well for most conversations.
It's a risk-concentration question and a tax question at the same time, which is why it usually gets handled badly. Selling has a tax cost; not selling means a large part of your retirement depends on one company. The answer is a schedule, not a single decision.
Whatever you elected, often years earlier. Distribution elections are typically irrevocable and can push a very large amount of income into a small number of years. It should be coordinated with your withdrawal sequence rather than discovered alongside it.
Yes, and the decade before is when most of the consequential decisions get made — pension elections, deferred comp, and the Roth conversion window that opens the year you stop working.
Yes. Virginia taxes distributions from traditional IRAs and 401(k) plans as ordinary income. Social Security is not taxed, and Virginia has no estate or inheritance tax. Withdrawal sequencing is where most of the controllable tax lives.
It's middling. Social Security is exempt and there is no estate or inheritance tax, but ordinary income tax applies to pension and retirement-account withdrawals, and the age-65 subtraction phases out at higher incomes. Whether it works for you depends on where your income comes from, not just where you live.
Last reviewed 2026-08-11
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