Hazel Secco Named a Highly Rated Financial Advisor for 2026: What 19 Client Reviews Say

Aug 04 — 2026
Blog, Fee-Only Financial Advisor

Estimated reading time: 6 minutes

What This Financial Advisor Award Means
Thank You to My Clients
The Team Behind Every Meeting
What I Credit It To
If You Are Choosing a Financial Advisor Right Now
Referrals: The Greatest Compliment
Ready to see if we are the right fit?
Sources

The email landed on a Thursday afternoon, in between a tax-projection meeting and a call with a client who had just picked her retirement date after two years of circling it. I read it twice before it registered.

For the second year in a row, Wealthtender has named me a Voice of the Client Highly Rated Advisor.

I want to be honest about why I am sharing this. There is no shortage of financial advisor awards, and most of them are not worth your attention or mine. This one is, for a single reason: I did not submit anything to win it. My clients wrote it. (Read the press release here.)

What This Financial Advisor Award Means

Most industry recognition measures the size of a firm. Assets under management, production numbers, headcount, revenue growth. Those are business metrics. They tell you how big an advisor is. They tell you nothing about what it feels like to be her client.

The Wealthtender Voice of the Client award measures something else entirely. It is built on verified reviews written by real clients, and it recognizes advisors whose ratings stay high across those reviews. My profile currently shows 19 Certified Advisor Reviews and a 4.9 out of 5 rating.

No part of that number came from me. It came from women who sat across from me during a divorce, a widowhood, a layoff at 54, a retirement date that kept moving. They took time they did not have and wrote about it.

That is the version of “award-winning financial advisor” I actually care about.

Thank You to My Clients

To the women who wrote those reviews: thank you.

Thank you for trusting me with the parts of your financial life that are not really about money. The decision about whether you can retire before your husband. The question you were embarrassed to ask about your own 401(k). The spreadsheet you had been maintaining alone for eleven years.

You are the reason this recognition exists, and I do not take that lightly.

The Team Behind Every Meeting

This is technically an individual award, but nothing about the way we serve clients at Align is a solo act.

Behind every meeting is a team preparing the tax modeling, tracking the follow-through, and making sure nothing falls between the cracks in the weeks when you are not thinking about your plan. The clients who wrote those reviews were describing an experience that several people built. I am grateful to every one of them.

What I Credit It To

Two decisions, both made years ago, both structural.

The first is being fee-only. I sell advice. That is the whole product line. There are no commissions behind my recommendations, no fund that pays me more than another fund, no insurance product with a payout schedule attached. When a client writes that she trusts what I tell her, that structure is the reason the trust holds. I have written more about why the fee-only distinction matters and about when an advisor is actually worth it.

The second is going deep instead of wide. I built this practice around women in the retirement runway, the five to ten years on either side of the retirement date, when the sequence of decisions matters more than it ever will again. Retirement timing, equity compensation, Roth conversion windows, Social Security claiming, and the tax consequences that tie all of them together.

That focus changes the quality of the conversation. A client whose advisor has seen her exact situation dozens of times gets a different meeting than a client who is one account among a thousand. The reviews reflect that difference. If you want to see how the focus shapes the way the firm actually runs, it is laid out at The Align Difference.

Neither decision was made to win a financial advisor award. But if you are evaluating advisors right now, they are the two things I would look at first.

If You Are Choosing a Financial Advisor Right Now

Choosing an advisor is one of the more personal decisions you will make, and the badges on a website are the least useful part of the research. If you are in the middle of it, here is what I would actually check:

Who supplied the input? Did clients write it, or did the advisor’s marketing team submit an application?
Is the criteria published? A real standard is a number you can look up and verify.
Is the financial relationship disclosed? In writing, plainly, without you having to dig for it.

On that last one, I will hold myself to the same standard. Align Financial Solutions pays Wealthtender for marketing services, including eligibility to be considered for this award. The full disclosure is at the bottom of this post. The award criteria are objective and that payment does not influence them.

My commitment to you is simple, and it has not changed since the day I opened the firm:

Objective, fee-only advice. I do not sell products. I build plans.
A fiduciary standard. Your interests come first, in writing, every time.
Specialized expertise. Planning designed for high-earning women approaching and moving through retirement, not repackaged generic advice.

Referrals: The Greatest Compliment

Align grows almost entirely through the women already in it.

If someone you care about is staring down a retirement date, a divorce, a widowhood, or an equity package she has never had explained to her properly, and you think she deserves a highly rated second opinion, I would be honored to meet her.

Thank you for being part of this community. I am grateful for the trust, and I am looking forward to what we build together through the rest of 2026.

Hazel Secco, CFP®, CDFA®, Founder & Lead Financial Planner

Ready to see if we are the right fit?

If you are looking for a fee-only fiduciary partner to help you work through the years around your retirement date with clarity, I would love to meet you. Book a 15-minute Align Call. It is a low-pressure, no-obligation conversation about where you are and what you are trying to solve.

Book Your Align Call

You can also read every one of the reviews yourself on my Wealthtender profile. Nineteen clients describing their real experience will tell you more than any award announcement, including this one.

🌐 https://alignfinancialsolutions.com
📺 https://www.youtube.com/@AlignYourRetirement
💼 https://linkedin.com/in/hazel-secco

Award Disclosures: Wealthtender awarded Hazel Secco the Wealthtender Voice of the Client Highly Rated Advisor award on July 9, 2026, based on Certified Advisor Reviews™ published on Wealthtender between January 1, 2026 and June 30, 2026, with a minimum average rating of 4.75 out of 5. Wealthtender, Inc. created and tabulates this award. Although Align Financial Solutions LLC compensates Wealthtender for marketing services (including eligibility to be considered for this award), Wealthtender’s award criteria is objective and not influenced by compensation. This award is not a guarantee of future performance or success, and client reviews may not be representative of the experience of all past or future clients. View additional award details and FAQs.

Disclaimer: Advisory services are offered through Align Financial Solutions LLC (“AFS”), an Investment Advisor in the State of New Jersey. This article is for educational purposes only and does not constitute personalized tax, legal, investment, or financial planning advice. Rules and figures are current for 2026 and subject to change. Consult a qualified professional about your specific situation.