Onboarding With Us and What to Bring

Once you've decided to work with Queen City Wealth Planning, the next few weeks look different from the ongoing relationship you'll settle into afterward — there's a defined onboarding process before the regular meeting cadence begins, and a specific set of documents that make that process faster and more accurate. This page walks through what happens in your first weeks with us, what to bring to your first meeting, why your equity paperwork specifically matters, and how we handle your account access and data once you're a client.

What happens in the first six weeks?

Signing on with us starts a structured onboarding process, not an immediate jump into ongoing advice — we use it to build a complete picture of your situation before making any recommendations. The process runs three meetings over roughly six weeks. The first is a discovery meeting, where we go through your full financial picture: income, existing accounts, equity grants, debts, goals, and anything time-sensitive already on your calendar, such as an upcoming vest or an option expiration. Between the first and second meetings, we do the analysis: modeling your equity, checking your portfolio for concentration, and drafting the plan we'll bring back to you. The second meeting is the plan presentation, where we walk through our specific recommendations and the reasoning behind each one, and you get the chance to push back, ask questions, or flag anything that doesn't match your situation before anything is implemented. The third meeting is implementation: opening or linking accounts, setting up the read-only access described later on this page, and confirming the concrete first steps — which trades to make, which forms to complete, which deadlines are coming up soonest. Once implementation is done, you move into the ongoing relationship's regular meeting cadence rather than staying on an onboarding-specific schedule.

What documents should I bring to our first meeting?

The more you bring to your first meeting, the more specific we can be from day one, rather than spending part of that meeting chasing down numbers we could have had in advance. At minimum, bring your latest pay stub and your last two tax returns, so we can see both your current cash flow and how your total income and withholding actually played out. Bring statements for every investment and retirement account you hold, including your 401(k) and any brokerage accounts, so we can see your full asset allocation rather than just the pieces you remember off the top of your head. If your compensation includes equity, bring your grant agreements and vesting schedule, your ESPP enrollment form, and, if you've had any exercises or ESPP purchases already, the tax forms tied to them — a Form 3921 for an ISO exercise, a Form 3922 for an ESPP purchase, and any 1099-B from a sale, along with the W-2 that shows how prior equity events were reported as income. We also ask for a summary of your workplace benefits, including health insurance, disability coverage, and any employer retirement match, so your plan accounts for what you already have rather than duplicating or ignoring it. None of this needs to be perfectly organized before you send it; we can work with whatever you have.

What do you need from my equity paperwork?

Equity paperwork gets its own question because it changes our recommendations more than almost anything else you bring us, and because the documents that matter are not always the ones people think to gather on their own. The grant agreement and the plan document together set the actual rules of your options or restricted stock — the strike price, the vesting schedule, the type of award, and what happens to it if you leave the company — and none of that is visible from a brokerage statement alone. Your exercise history matters because it establishes what has already happened for tax purposes: which grants have been exercised, when, and at what price, which determines what basis and holding-period clock applies to shares you already hold. Any Form 3921 you've received documents an ISO exercise the way your broker's own paperwork often does not, and a Form 3922 does the same for an ESPP purchase — both forms carry the exact dates and prices the IRS also has on file, so they are the most reliable record when your own memory or your brokerage's summary is incomplete. The vesting schedule itself tells us what is still coming: how much unvested equity you're holding, when the next tranche lands, and how concentrated your position could become if none of it is sold along the way. Each of these documents answers a different question, which is why we ask for the whole set rather than a single summary statement.

How do you handle my data and logins?

We connect to your accounts using read-only data links wherever your custodian or provider supports them, which means we can see balances, holdings, and transaction history without ever having the ability to move money or place a trade in your name — that authority stays with you unless we have a separate, explicit agreement in place for managing an account directly. We never ask for or store your account passwords; if a provider does not support a read-only connection, we work from statements you send us instead of requesting login credentials. Documents you share with us, such as tax returns, grant agreements, and statements, are kept in a secure document vault rather than emailed back and forth, and access to that vault is limited to the people actually working on your plan. If you ever want to see exactly what accounts we can view, or to revoke a connection, you can do that directly through your provider's own permissions settings at any time, without needing to go through us first.

What will I walk away with?

By the end of onboarding, you'll have a written financial plan that covers your full picture: cash flow, a concentration and diversification review of your equity, a tax-planning summary tied to your specific equity calendar for the year ahead, and a clear set of next steps with owners and rough dates attached to each one, not just a list of general ideas. Any accounts we're managing on an ongoing basis will be linked and visible in one place, so you can see your whole portfolio without logging into five different providers. You'll also know exactly what to expect going forward: your two scheduled review meetings each year, what each one covers, and how to reach us in between them with a question that cannot wait. The goal of the first engagement is that nothing about your equity or your broader plan is a surprise anymore — everything that was implicit or scattered across statements before now has a plan and a place.

Key numbers (2026)

• Onboarding timeline — three meetings over roughly six weeks: discovery, plan presentation, implementation (our onboarding process).
• Meeting cadence after onboarding — two scheduled reviews a year, spring and autumn, plus unlimited questions by message (our fee schedule).
• Ongoing advisory fee — 0.75% per year of managed assets, billed quarterly in arrears (our fee schedule).
• Form 3921 / 3922 furnishing deadline — your employer must furnish these forms to you by January 31 of the year following the exercise or purchase (IRS Pub 525; 26 CFR §1.6039-2).
• Form ADV Part 2A delivery — SEC rules require an investment adviser to deliver its brochure (Form ADV Part 2A) to you before or at the time you enter into an advisory agreement (SEC Form ADV Part 2A instructions / Rule 204-3).

Current as of 2026-09

Sources

• Instructions for Forms 3921 and 3922 — https://www.irs.gov/instructions/i3921
• IRS Publication 525, Taxable and Nontaxable Income — https://www.irs.gov/publications/p525
• 26 CFR §1.6039-2 — https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/26/1.6039-2
• 17 CFR §275.204-3 (SEC "brochure rule") — https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/17/275.204-3

Sample content for demonstration purposes — not financial advice.