What are the opening hours?

Monday 8:30am - 5pm Tuesday 8:30am - 5pm Wednesday 8:30am - 5pm Thursday 8:30am - 5pm Friday 8:30am - 5pm

Covenant Wealth Advisors

Home
United States
Richmond, VA
Covenant Wealth Advisors

We do our best work helping clients age 50 plus who have over $1 million in investments and retirement savings.

Covenant Wealth Advisors is an independent, fiduciary, fee-only financial advisory firm and financial planner specializing in retirement income planning, investment management, and tax planning. Founded in 2010, Covenant Wealth Advisors is an independent, fee-only financial planning firm and fiduciary advisor serving clients in Richmond VA, Williamsburg VA, and virtually across 21 states in the U.

S.

Our mission is to help individuals retire with peace of mind through a lifetime of clarity, insight, and partnership. Our financial planning, retirement income planning, and investment management services help you enjoy life without the stress of money. As a fiduciary, we are required by law to always put client interests first. Rather than simply sell products, we take the time to personalize strategies around your total financial life. As a fee-only firm, we never charge commissions or accept third-party payments. While technology drives our work, we're driven by real relationships and transparent communication. A culture of learning, teamwork, and dedication to always doing what's right for our clients drives Covenant's people.

09/03/2026

Muni bond fund investors earned half of what their funds returned.

Morningstar's new study covers the ten years through December 2025.
Municipal bond funds returned 2.2% a year. The average dollar
invested in them earned 1.1%.

Stock investors, meanwhile, were fine — 12.8% against their funds'
13.3%.

The numbers:
→ U.S. stock funds: 12.8% investor vs. 13.3% fund
→ All funds: 8.7% vs. 9.9%
→ Muni bond funds: 1.1% vs. 2.2%

Two caveats worth stating. Munis returned little in absolute terms
over this stretch, so a 1.1-point shortfall is enormous in relative
terms and modest in dollars. And a peer-reviewed paper in this year's
Financial Analysts Journal argues Morningstar's methodology overstates
the size of these gaps. Not every dollar of it is a mistake —
rebalancing and spending move money too.

Still, the pattern is worth sitting with. The sleeve most investors
think of as the safe, boring one is where the timing damage showed up.
Bonds bought as a shock absorber only absorb shocks if you hold them
through the shock.

Which part of your portfolio do you second-guess most — the stocks or
the bonds?

Educational only — not individualized advice.

09/01/2026

A $12,000 deduction that vanishes completely at $250,000 of income.

If you're 65 or older and filing jointly, the new senior deduction is
worth $6,000 per spouse. But it shrinks by 6% of every dollar of MAGI
above $150,000 — per spouse. Cross $250,000 and it's gone.

The numbers:
→ $12,000 at $150K joint MAGI, both spouses 65+
→ $6,000 left at $200K
→ $0 at $250K

For a couple in that range, each additional $1,000 of MAGI costs about
$120 of deduction. That's a quiet surcharge on top of your stated
bracket — and it lands squarely on the moves this stage of planning
runs on: Roth conversions, realizing gains, a large IRA withdrawal.

Two details that change the math. The deduction exists only for tax
years 2025 through 2028. And the $150,000 threshold is fixed in the
statute, not indexed — so the same income buys less deduction each
year of the window.

None of which means skip the conversion. A conversion sized to fill a
low bracket can still be worth more than the deduction it costs. It
means the deduction belongs in the calculation, not discovered in
April. Worth reviewing with your CPA and advisor before year-end,
since the answer turns on your own MAGI and filing status.

Educational only — not individualized advice.

08/27/2026

A $50,000 gift now buys about $2,750 less tax benefit.

Two rules took effect January 1, and together they raised the after-tax
cost of giving for high earners.

First, itemizers lose the deduction on the first 0.5% of AGI. On $1M of
income, that's $5,000 of giving that no longer counts.

Second, if you're in the 37% bracket, itemized deductions are now worth
35 cents on the dollar, not 37.

The numbers — hypothetical, $1M AGI, 37% bracket:
→ Gift: $50,000, both years
→ 2025: $50,000 deductible, about $18,500 of tax value
→ 2026: $45,000 deductible, about $15,750 of tax value
→ Difference: roughly $2,750

The gift didn't change. The math around it did. Bunching several years of
giving into one year, or giving directly from an IRA through a qualified
charitable distribution, may soften the effect — a QCD sidesteps the
deduction rules entirely. Whether either fits depends on your income, your
itemizing status, and your goals.

If you give every year, are you changing how you give in 2026 — or giving
the same way and absorbing it?

Hypothetical example for illustration only. Educational only — not
individualized advice.

08/25/2026

Fidelity's healthcare cost estimate for a 65-year-old retiring in 2026: $185,500.

That's health care alone. Per person. Before a single dollar of long-term care.

For a couple retiring on a seven-figure portfolio, this isn't a rounding
error. It's a six-figure obligation that arrives in monthly installments
across a 20- to 30-year retirement, and it has been climbing faster than
most plans assume.

The numbers:
→ $185,500 per person, up 7.5% in one year
→ Roughly $371,000 for a couple (two individual estimates)
→ Up from $157,500 for someone who retired in 2023

Nearly half of that total — 45% — is Medicare Part B and Part D premiums.
Which means income matters. The taxable income your withdrawal sequence
produces in one year can raise the premium half of this bill two years
later through IRMAA surcharges.

So there are two levers worth reviewing, not one: what you set aside for
health care, and what your income looks like on the way to funding it. Your
own costs will land differently depending on health, coverage choices, and
where you live.

And remember what this number leaves out entirely. Long-term care is a
separate plan.

Educational only — not individualized advice.

08/14/2026

When stocks corrected since 2010, bonds lost 0.8%.

If you're retired and drawing income, a market drop isn't dangerous because of the drop. It's dangerous if it forces you to sell stocks to fund next month's withdrawal.

That's the job the bond side of your portfolio is actually doing. Not producing returns — producing the dollars that let the stock side recover untouched.

The numbers:

→ S&P 500 during those corrections: -17.5% average
→ Bloomberg U.S. Aggregate over the same stretches: -0.8% average
→ In 2025 alone, the S&P 500 fell 19% at its worst point and still
finished the year up 18%. Bonds never fell more than 3%.

2022 is the honest exception. Stocks and high-quality bonds fell together that year, and many bonds did not play their usual role.

Bonds are a shock absorber, not a guarantee — and these are index
figures, which no one can invest in directly.

The useful question isn't whether another correction is coming. It's how many years of withdrawals you could fund without touching equities if one arrived next quarter.

We charted the full year-by-year history — every intra-year drop in both stocks and bonds since 1988 — here: https://www.covenantwealthadvisors.com/post/do-bonds-go-down-when-stocks-go-down

Educational only — not individualized advice.

08/13/2026

Last month we changed how we hire.

We added a structured skills assessment to the front of the process — real, scored, objective testing on the things the job actually requires. Attention to detail. Following instructions precisely. Client communication. Everyone takes it. It runs before anybody forms an opinion in a room.

We did it because likability is a terrible predictor of operational excellence, and we were tired of pretending otherwise.

Katelyn Bunch posted the highest scores of any candidate we've assessed for the position. She's joining Covenant Wealth Advisors as a Client Service Associate.

Those specific skills aren't arbitrary. The client service seat is where a financial plan stops being a document and becomes real life — transfers, beneficiary forms, distributions, deadlines that don't move. A missed detail in this role isn't a typo. It's someone's money, at a moment that matters to them.

Katelyn has done this work before. She spent two years as a Client Services Associate and Director of Operations at a Virginia advisory firm, and before that handled compliance at another. She knows what a custodian deadline feels like at 4:45 on a Friday. She's Lean Six Sigma trained, which tells you how she thinks about a broken process.

And she's direct. In interviews she said what she thought rather than what she guessed we wanted. On a fast-moving operations team that's not a personality quirk, it's a safety feature. The people who catch problems are the ones willing to say "this is wrong" out loud.

Strong scores got our attention. The experience and the candor got her the offer.

Welcome, Katelyn. We're thrilled you're here.

08/12/2026

We posted a paraplanner role. Out of every candidate who applied, exactly one also emailed the firm directly.

That was Rylee Johnson. She started this week.

I want to tell you why we hired her, because I think it's useful to anyone job hunting right now.

The email mattered. Not because it was clever — it wasn't a stunt. It was short and it was to us specifically. Applying through a portal is fine, and everyone does it. Taking the extra ten minutes to reach the actual humans doing the hiring is a signal about how someone will approach work when the easy path is available. One out of the whole pool did it.

Then came the interview, and one question we ask everybody: where do you want to be in five years? Most people this early in a career give you some version of "wherever I'm needed." It's a safe answer and it tells you nothing. Rylee had a real one. She'd thought about it before she walked in.

But here's the part that actually decided it for me. For the last twelve to eighteen months she volunteered with Big Brothers Big Sisters, and she described it as growing alongside her "Little" — not as what she was giving her. That's a posture, and you can't train it. Either someone shows up for another person on an ordinary Tuesday when nobody's watching, or they don't.

Rylee graduated from High Point University in May — B.S. in Business Administration with a healthcare management minor, which matters more in retirement planning than most people expect. Dean's List. Siegfried Leadership Fellowship. This is her first role out of school, and she'll be supporting the planning work behind our clients' financial plans.

We can teach the software. We can teach the tax code. We can't teach someone to treat a stranger's retirement with the care they'd want for their own parents. So we hire for that and build the rest.

Welcome, Rylee. The whole team is glad you're here.

07/16/2026

66% of individual stocks trailed their own index over 40 years.

After the run tech stocks have had this year, a portfolio that started the year balanced can end it concentrated — one position quietly doing all the heavy lifting.

J.P. Morgan studied every stock in the Russell 3000 from 1980 to 2020. The odds facing any single stock were sobering.

The numbers:

→ 66% delivered worse returns than the index itself
→ 42% lost money outright over their lifetime
→ More than 40% fell 70%+ from their peak and never recovered
→ Only about 1 in 10 became a "megawinner"

To be fair: a concentrated position may be how you built your wealth in the first place. And unwinding one has real trade-offs — capital gains taxes and IRMAA surcharges (if 65 and over) chief among them. The right move depends on your situation.

But hope is not a plan. If a single stock now dominates your portfolio, put the exit rules in writing before the market writes them for you: staged sales, charitable gifts of appreciated shares, an exchange fund, and more...

Educational only — not individualized advice.

07/15/2026

79% of active large-cap funds lost to the S&P 500 last year.

And 2025 was supposed to be a stock picker's market — a near-bear-market drop in April, the highest S&P 500 dispersion since 2009, then a sharp recovery.

It was still the fourth-worst year for active large-cap managers in the 25-year history of the SPIVA Scorecard.

The numbers:

→ 79% of active large-cap U.S. funds trailed the S&P 500 — up from 65% in 2024

→ 82% of investment-grade bond funds trailed their benchmark

→ The exception: only 41% of small-cap funds underperformed

Some managers do beat their index. The problem is picking them in advance — and SPIVA finds underperformance rates rise as time horizons lengthen. Over 15 years, no fund category shows majority outperformance.

On a $2M+ portfolio, the cost of funds that trail their benchmark compounds quietly for decades. Review every active holding against its index — net of fees — over a full decade, not last year's leaderboard.

Is there any part of your portfolio where you'd still pay up for active management?

Educational only — not individualized advice.

07/14/2026

The 2026 estate tax exemption was scheduled to fall to roughly $7M.

Instead, it's $15 million per person — $30 million for a married couple. Last year's tax law canceled the scheduled sunset, raised the exemption, and made it permanent, indexed to inflation.

The numbers:

→ 2017: $5.49M per person
→ 2018: $11.18M after the exemption doubled
→ 2026: $15M — up $1.01M from 2025 alone

For most households under $15M, federal estate tax is now off the table. But "permanent" removes the urgency, not the planning:

Several states tax estates at far lower thresholds — some starting around $1M — regardless of the federal number.

Portability isn't automatic. A surviving spouse only inherits the deceased spouse's unused exemption if the executor files an estate tax return at the first death, even when no tax is owed.

And a $15M estate growing at 7% can outrun an exemption growing at the pace of inflation. The gap compounds quietly.

Permanent also means "until Congress changes it." Documents written for the old sunset may now be doing the wrong job — worth a review.

Educational only — not individualized advice.

Address

8001 Franklin Farms Drive, RM 208
Richmond, VA

Opening Hours

Monday	8:30am - 5pm
Tuesday	8:30am - 5pm
Wednesday	8:30am - 5pm
Thursday	8:30am - 5pm
Friday	8:30am - 5pm

Telephone

+17572590111

Website

http://www.covenantwealthadvisors.com/

Alerts

Be the first to know and let us send you an email when Covenant Wealth Advisors posts news and promotions. Your email address will not be used for any other purpose, and you can unsubscribe at any time.