As more advisors move toward fee-based, planning-driven relationships with clients, a familiar blind spot persists across many books of business: a portion of a client’s assets sits outside the advisory relationship entirely, held in a non-advisory brokerage account at the same firm, or at another institution altogether. A legacy mutual fund position, a handful of individual securities, equity compensation, or an annuity purchased years ago often predates the advisory relationship and was never folded into it. The assets in advisory accounts receive an allocation strategy, a rebalancing cadence and regular review. The non-consolidated assets may be reviewed less frequently and can be easier to overlook in the context of the client’s overall financial picture.

That gap is easy to rationalize in the moment. A $5,000 mutual fund position can seem too small to justify building a model around. Clients may push back when asked to revisit a position that isn’t underperforming. And because many of these assets are often held outside an ongoing advisory arrangement, there may be fewer natural opportunities to revisit them over time. But easy to rationalize is not the same as easy to justify.

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Advisors often focus on the assets they directly manage, making it difficult to gauge how much of a client’s wealth remains outside the relationship. In conversations with advisors, I’ve found that outside assets can represent a larger portion of a household’s balance sheet than initially expected. When those advisors asked clients directly, a few found the actual figure was considerably higher, in some cases closer to 20%. What might explain the gap? Just as advisors can suffer from status quo bias and inertia, so too can investors. According to FINRA Investor Education Foundation’s 2024 Investor Survey, 25% of investors didn’t make a single trade in their non-retirement accounts over the past year, and another 31% trade only one to three times. That matters, because clients aren’t ignoring held-away accounts on purpose—they’re often just not thinking about them.

Left unaddressed, that blind spot carries real costs—for clients and advisors alike.

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The risk is real. When a client meets with a certified public accountant, attorney or insurance agent and held-away assets come up, that professional may refer the client to another advisor, and many have referral partnerships in place. If the advisor isn’t talking to the client about every account, someone else may be.

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Moving Non-Advisory Assets into a Managed Framework

In my experience, whenever an advisor speaks to a client about moving any assets into another account, the first question is often a single word: “Why?”

Advisors may have a compelling case to make. It can sound something like this, “If I’m charging you a fee to build a full plan addressing your goals across all investable assets, every dollar should be working toward that plan. Right now, part of your money isn’t being monitored, rebalanced or coordinated with everything else we’re doing together. Bringing it into the plan means one strategy, one view of your risk and one conversation about your progress toward your goals.”

Another common client objection is: “I don’t want to incur a tax bill to move this.” This gives advisors an opportunity to explain how in-kind transfers, where available, can help address that concern. When paired with an overlay or UMA structure, low-cost-basis positions may be incorporated into a managed framework rather than forcing a liquidation.

Below is a scalable, four-step process that advisors can incorporate into their practices to help prevent non-advisory assets from falling off the radar:

A managed framework offers something a collection of standalone accounts structurally cannot: coordination. Managing assets account by account means re-running the analysis, the rebalancing and the client conversation separately for each pocket of money.

A UMA-based approach, by contrast, lets an advisor apply one model, one fee schedule and one oversight process across a client’s entire investable base—turning what would otherwise be several disconnected relationships with a single client into one coordinated relationship, managed efficiently at scale.

For advisors, the opportunity extends beyond any individual client. The same consolidated approach that simplifies one account also scales across a book of business, providing a more consistent framework for portfolio oversight and client engagement. giving advisors a more efficient way to potentially grow assets under management, deepen client relationships and reduce the operational drag of managing fragmented portfolios one account at a time.

Remember, every held-away account presents an opportunity for another advisor to jump in and offer investment and/or tax advice. As a longtime industry professional, I know that many advisors looking for new business start the conversation with a prospect by asking, “How much money have you got? Where is it?” After the prospect discusses their advisory accounts, the advisor asks, “What about other accounts not with your advisor?” The best defense is to ask that question first.

The data points in the same direction. According to CEG Worldwide’s survey of nearly 1,100 advisors, 61.5% of those earning more than $1 million a year report managing 76% to 100% of their clients’ total investable assets, while those earning less than $500,000 tend to manage just 25% to 50%.

Every held-away account is a conversation waiting to happen. Advisors who start it—and clearly explain the risk of leaving assets outside the plan—can serve their clients more effectively and build more resilient practices for the long term.