Like Fleetwood Mac’s Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks in the ’70s, more financial advisors are deciding to go their own way.

Movement hit a new record last year, with more than 11,000 advisors with at least three years of experience changing firms, a 16.2% year-over-year jump, according to Diamond Consultants. More advisors are finding that the cost of leaving big, traditional players is paying off: Some of the largest and best-paid teams in the industry left wirehouses in 2025, with 29 of the 54 $1-billion-plus teams that moved departing from wirehouses per the report.

There are plenty of ways for advisors to transition, but the wirehouse channel has the highest share of advisors who are unlikely to stay or are undecided about sticking with their current firm over the next year at 19% compared with 12% of advisors overall, according to data from Cerulli. When asked where they’d like to go if they switched firms, 71% of advisors across all channels said they would go independent.

“They’re more and more frustrated with the wirehouse model,” said Brett Mulder, managing director at investment bank and strategic advisory firm Echelon Partners. That may be due to larger wirehouses undergoing cultural changes, having restrictive compliance, outdated technology or limited options from an investment management perspective. “Hearing about the independence and the entrepreneurial environment that they can join at an RIA, they’re very much attracted to that and feel like that’s an improvement on their life currently at the wirehouse,” Mulder said.

Not Another Lonely Day

Advisors Phil Scott and Jim Atwood recently took the leap. The duo led two of the largest wealth management practices at J.P. Morgan Advisors, and grew their combined revenue from $34 million to over $130 million over the past six years. But now, they’re headed out on their own to launch Latigo Peak Partners, an independent firm for ultrahigh-net-worth clients. The firm is self-funded, with no private equity capital, a decision the partners made in part because it helped them take advantage of one of the perks of going independent: building a family legacy business. Atwood said that both Scott and he have children who want to eventually join the firm.

“We’re building something that’s going to last further than us,” Atwood said.

But even for advisors who don’t want their firms to outlive them, being independent can mean you’re better positioned to get the value out of what you’ve built when it’s time to wind down. Among advisors planning to retire within the next decade, 38% of independent RIA advisors said their succession plan included an external sale, compared with 15% of advisors overall and just 1% of wirehouse advisors, per Cerulli.

Retirement aside, there are other benefits to breaking away:

  • One of the main ones for Adam Spiegelman, who spent nearly 15 years at Northwestern Mutual before moving to Commonwealth for seven years and then forming his own RIA firm last summer, was the freedom to run his practice exactly how he wanted. If a client is interested in hedge funds, he can have his chief investment officer research it and determine if it’s suitable for a client, versus going through a compliance team. He also doesn’t have to have tools vetted by compliance if he thinks the tech will help him do better work for clients. “It’s very freeing, and the world is essentially my oyster,” Spiegelman said.
  • There are pros in the financial column, too: 78% of breakaway advisors said a higher payout was the top attraction for leaving their firm, followed by the opportunity to build equity value in an independent business and greater autonomy, per Cerulli. When you start your own firm, your compensation is also up to you, said Robert Conzo, who left a wirehouse to cofound The Wealth Alliance in 2019. “You could decide what to spend on expenses and what to keep in your pocket, and you’re not subject to grid rates.”

Not everyone wants to start from scratch. Joining an independent firm that’s already up and running can offer flexibility.

The Cost of Packing Up

But taking the leap isn’t always rosy. The concern is often about losing clients: Advisors who transition to an independent model bring along an average 71% of their assets under management, Cerulli found. The assets they leave are in part due to advisors intentionally leaving some clients behind, typically because those clients have lower investable assets that may disproportionately take up the advisor’s time compared with revenue generated. But about 19 percentage points are lost because advisors can’t solicit certain clients; the clients are recruited by the former firm or just don’t want to move.

Other top concerns are the additional compliance responsibilities and operational requirements that come from exiting their current firm. Depending on whether an advisor joins a firm or starts their own, they may have to worry about payroll, human resources, technology, compliance and finding an office.

Technology, real estate and personnel were the biggest expenses for the Latigo Peak team, said Vice President Tom O’Brien, who managed many of the mechanics of the breakaway. Atwood said that his entire team transitioned with them, and he and his partner guaranteed their income for the next 12 months to be at least what they were making with their previous jobs.

Despite the challenges, the breakaway trend is strengthening, Mulder said. While the aforementioned perks of ditching a wirehouse play a part, technology has also made the transition to an independent firm much more seamless than it was even five years ago, said Andrew Blake, an associate director in Cerulli’s wealth management practice.

“We’ve seen such drastic growth in the wealth tech space now that advisors feel much more confident saying ‘Maybe I don’t need Morgan Stanley’s platform, and I can kind of build this out myself,’” Blake said. “It just feels a lot more manageable and feasible for advisors to take that leap now, because they know that they can have this technology supporting them. It’s really an important piece of the puzzle.”

The Right Thing To Do? Breaking away can be extremely fulfilling personally and financially, but it doesn’t make sense for everyone. “It’s a significant lift to move your practice, from all the client conversations to moving your portfolios to the compliance and operational burden,” Blake said. Advisors who are at a later stage of their careers, ingrained in the business operations and hesitant about reaching out to all their clients and losing some assets are those most likely to stay put, Blake added.

The firms seeing advisors leaving are trying to respond to that trend. They’re wondering “How can we make this more attractive? How can we put [advisors] in touch with more potential successors? How can we encourage them to build teams so they have more in-house optionality for people to transition their practice to?” Blake said. “Those kinds of programs are definitely taking off to offset some of the movement.”