When the Plan Is the Meeting: How Momentum Wealth Management Closed $3M in 60 Days Using AI-Powered Planning
- Brendan King
- 13 hours ago
- 4 min read
Most advisory firms treat financial planning as a deliverable — something built after the client meeting and sent as a PDF follow-up. Momentum Wealth Management flipped that entirely. Here's what changed, and what it produced.
There's a pattern most financial advisors know well. The prospective client comes in for a discovery meeting. The advisor listens, asks good questions, takes notes. They shake hands and part ways. Then, over the next few days, the advisor builds the plan and sends it as a polished PDF.
The issue isn't the quality of the plan. It's the timing and the purpose. By the time that PDF lands in someone's inbox, the energy from the original conversation has already faded. And the odds that a client or prospect remembers the key points, especially in more complex planning scenarios, are slim. Clients don't need to recall every technical detail. They simply need to understand that certain planning techniques carry real economic weight and that some strategies can have a significant impact on their long-term wealth. That's what sticks.
Emil Aldaddah and Jacob Derrig, Co-Founders and Partners at Momentum Wealth Management, recognized this gap and set out to solve it. Not by polishing their PDF deliverable. By rethinking the planning experience altogether.
"Planning is now the focal point of the client conversation, and investment strategy flows from it, not the other way around. That's not a software upgrade. That's a structural change in how advice gets delivered."
— Emil Aldaddah, CIO and Co-Founder, Momentum Wealth Management
How Wavvest Planning works. Wavvest Planning is an AI-powered financial planning engine built directly into the Wavvest platform. Advisors can use pre-built AI agents to generate a comprehensive planning analysis in seconds. Or they can describe a client's situation in plain language — income, goals, concerns, major life events — and the platform builds the plan from that context. Either path produces a fully interactive, dynamic framework rather than a static document. Assumptions update in real time. Scenarios layer on top of each other. The numbers respond as the conversation moves.
Coming from EMoney, RightCapital, and MoneyGuidePro, Momentum estimates saving two to three hours per planning session. Emil is quick to note, though, that the time savings aren't really the point. What matters is where those hours go. Instead of post-meeting production work, they go into live analysis with the client sitting there.
“Many advisors can explain the intricacies of a planning technique, but that’s only part of the dialogue. Sometimes you can get too deep in the weeds. What clients really want to understand is the value a strategy creates—how it positions their wealth to not only meet their goals but optimize them. What’s the theoretical economic impact? That’s what Momentum aims to clarify. We quantify why a planning idea is worth exploring and explain it simply and visually. That, we believe, is the catalyst for long-term, meaningful dialogue and truly beneficial client partnerships."
-Jacob F. Derrig, MBA, CFP®, ChFC®, CFS®, CEO and Co-Founder, Momentum Wealth Management
Beyond Monte Carlo. Most planning tools, however capable, ultimately produce probability outputs. They tell you the odds your portfolio survives to age 95 at a given withdrawal rate. That's useful information, but it doesn't translate cleanly into a decision. It doesn't tell a client what a specific choice is actually worth, or how two strategies interact with each other.
Momentum structures engagements differently. They start with a clearly defined Base Case: what the client's trajectory looks like without any optimization. That becomes the reference point. From there, they isolate specific strategies one at a time, modeling the incremental impact of Roth conversions, Mega Backdoor Roth contributions, tax-loss harvesting paired with direct indexing, withdrawal sequencing, and others. Then they show what happens when those strategies work together as an integrated stack.
The result is something that's genuinely hard to show clients with traditional tools: the economic value of each planning decision, on its own and as part of a coordinated whole. The advisory value isn't implied. It's quantified, in dollars, on the screen, as the conversation is happening.
Every scenario also gets stress-tested against moderate and severe market downturns, modeling environments like 2008, 2020, and the 2022 rate cycle. Clients see not just their projected outcomes but how durable those outcomes are when conditions get difficult. It's less a plan and more a decision framework.
Two competitive wins in 60 days. This approach has been particularly effective when Momentum is competing against other firms for a new relationship.
In both cases, what set Momentum apart wasn't just analytical depth. It was immediacy. The client could watch the numbers respond to their questions in real time, without waiting for a follow-up. The decision happened in the room because the evidence was already there.
Built for complexity, not just simplicity. One of the more important qualities of Wavvest Planning is that it scales with the client. For a straightforward situation, it produces a clean, comprehensive plan in minutes. For more complex families, the same framework accommodates SLATs, IDGTs, CRTs, family foundations, and charitable vehicles, modeling how those structures interact with income planning, liquidity events, and long-term capital deployment across a single integrated balance sheet.
For a firm like Momentum, whose clients range from early-accumulation business owners to multi-generational families with layered estate and tax needs, that matters a lot. They don't need a different tool at different complexity levels. The framework stays consistent. The depth adjusts to match.
For advisors still working on the traditional model — build the plan, send the PDF, schedule a follow-up — what Momentum has demonstrated is worth considering. Clients don't just value sophisticated planning. They respond to it differently when they experience it as a live conversation rather than a document that arrives three days later.
“Part of what I love about this industry is that no two days are ever the same. Markets evolve, tax laws shift, and client goals naturally change over time. That’s why modern planning requires capabilities and partnerships that are just as adaptable. Flexibility isn’t a luxury anymore—it’s essential.”
-Jacob F. Derrig, MBA, CFP®, ChFC®, CFS®, CEO and Co-Founder, Momentum Wealth Management
The plan has always been the product. What's changed is where and how it gets built.
