A financial advisor for pastors who already speaks the language.
Fee-only. A fiduciary. Paid by you and nobody else. And clergy compensation is not something we looked up before the meeting.
The problem with hiring a good general advisor
It is not competence. It is vocabulary.
A capable advisor who has never worked with ministers will handle your investments fine and then miss the four or five things that are actually specific to you, because nothing in their training flagged them. You will spend the first several meetings teaching them, and you will pay for those meetings.
Worse, some of the clergy-specific decisions do not come back around. A minister can make an irreversible choice in a single phone call with an advisor who did not know it was irreversible.
What a clergy-fluent advisor is watching
Dual status
For income tax you are generally treated as an employee of the church. For Social Security and Medicare, your ministerial earnings are treated as self-employment. You are both at once, which is why clergy returns get prepared wrong by people who prepare returns for a living.
The housing allowance, and its ceiling
The exclusion is limited to the lowest of three things: what the church designated in advance, what you actually spent, and the fair rental value of your furnished home plus utilities. The third one surprises people, and it is the one that quietly caps a generous designation.
SECA, and where it stops
While you are serving, the housing allowance counts in your self-employment earnings even though it is excluded from income tax. After you retire, a housing allowance is treated differently for self-employment tax purposes. The timing distinction matters and it is routinely stated wrong.
The Form 4361 decision, and its shadow
Under current law the exemption is irrevocable, and the earnings it covers never build Social Security or Medicare credit. The Medicare part is the one that ambushes people, because it does not present itself until they are sixty-five.
The church plan
A 403(b)(9) can do things an IRA cannot. That makes the decision to move money out of one a different decision than it looks like, and it is one of the few in retirement planning that may not be reversible.
The allowance does not pass to your spouse
The exclusion is tied to ministerial service and it does not transfer. The IRS is direct about it: a minister's surviving spouse cannot exclude the rental value unless it is for ministerial services that spouse performed. A church that keeps paying a surviving spouse a housing allowance may be handing them taxable income while everyone involved believes it is a kindness.
General education, not advice. Clergy tax rules turn on specific facts, and individual situations vary considerably. Nothing on this page is advice about your circumstances or a prediction of any outcome. Talk with a qualified tax professional about your own facts before you act.
How we are paid, since that is the other half of the question
We are fee-only. Our clients pay us and no one else does. We sell no products, earn no commissions, and receive nothing from any fund company or insurer.
Part of what we charge is based on the money we manage for you. We do not bill on your church retirement plan or any account we do not manage. We will advise on it either way, and it is not part of the fee, which means leaving that money where it is costs us nothing.
That is deliberate. A minister deciding whether to move money out of a church plan should not be getting that advice from someone whose pay goes up if the answer is yes. Our conflicts are disclosed in our Form ADV, and the main one is described plainly on our fees page.
Start here
The Pastor Retirement Checkup
One focused engagement. You bring your situation, we tell you in writing where your retirement actually stands, and you decide what happens next. No ongoing commitment.
$599 for an individual. $799 for a married couple.