Pillar6 Advisors

Pillar6 Advisors

Pillar6 Advisors opened in 2010 when Roman Polnar left a decade of corporate financial-services work to structure a firm that would sell financial planning as the primary product, not as a loss leader for asset gathering. The firm operates from a single office at 1160 Battery Street in San Francisco and serves individuals, high-net-worth families, and closely held business owners. All client engagements are governed by a fiduciary standard—the firm explicitly avoids compensation structures that create conflicts. Pillar6 organizes its delivery across three practice lines: comprehensive financial planning, investment advisory, and college planning. The planning practice addresses cash-flow design, tax strategy, equity-compensation modeling, risk and insurance evaluation, and estate and legacy coordination. Plan fees are fixed in advance and range from $6,500 to $30,000, with an hourly alternative available. The investment arm runs a central committee that sets tactical asset-allocation tilts—priming portfolios for relative strength—while outsourcing day-to-day implementation to Gemmer Asset Management and leaning on Dimensional Fund Advisors for academically informed portfolio construction. Client capital is custodied at Schwab and Betterment, not on Pillar6’s own balance sheet. The college practice specializes in optimizing financial-aid outcomes and tax treatment for families with college-bound children, a niche the firm describes as requiring joint expertise across admissions, aid, tax, and investment management. Team size is not publicly disclosed. The internal bench includes Founder and Principal Roman Polnar, a 24-year industry veteran; Senior Portfolio Manager Pat Carroll, who joined after decades on the investment side and runs the committee alongside Gemmer; and Vice President Carl Horne, who owns the insurance and risk-management vertical. Support staff includes two executive assistants, one based in Idaho and one in coastal North Carolina. The firm partnership with Gemmer gives clients the trading and rebalancing infrastructure of a 100-plus-year-experience asset manager, while the Dimensional relationship anchors the intellectual framework in Fama-French efficient-markets research. No recent operational event, such as a promotion, spinoff, or new office, appears in the public record within the last 24 months. What distinguishes Pillar6 is its structural disinterest in asset aggregation. Nearly every revenue stream—financial planning, investment guidance for DIY investors who hold assets elsewhere, hourly advisory work—is deliberately untethered from custody, and the firm’s own language emphasizes that clients can keep their accounts where they are. This makes the entity more of a professional-services firm in the RIA wrapper than a traditional wealth manager racing toward AUM scale. Succession risk sits entirely with Roman Polnar, the sole named founder and controlling principal, with no published transition plan.