Serenity Investment Advisors

Serenity Investment Advisors

Serenity Investment Advisors launched in Chicago in 2020, founded by Richard Little as an RIA structured around a single constraint: every advisor must hold the CFP designation. The firm targeted a gap Little observed during client consolidation work — families emerging from a parent’s death or a liquidity event often owned scattered accounts with no unifying plan — and built its intake around the promise that anything with a dollar sign attached gets mapped. The strategy runs across taxable brokerage, retirement accounts, education-funding vehicles such as 529 plans, and equity compensation including RSUs and ISOs. The firm does not commit to a single asset-class tilt; its process opens with goal identification and risk-tolerance quantification before investments are discussed, and it coordinates with outside CPAs and attorneys on tax and estate execution. No private-market positions, direct-deal pipelines, or fund-of-funds structures are disclosed — the investment posture stays within publicly traded securities and cash-flow planning, with the portfolio managed as an allocated pool rather than a series of one-off bets. The practice serves individuals, trusts, and corporations, with a visible concentration among HENRYs — high earners not rich yet — and business owners managing simultaneous personal and company finances. Headcount and AUM are not published, but the firm states it has earned a spot on AdvisorHub’s “Top RIAs to Watch” for three consecutive years, with the June 2025 listing marking the most recent renewal. The 2025 Forbes Best-in-State ranking, researched by SHOOK Research using data as of March 2025, covers advisors under approximately age 40, placing the firm’s operator squarely in the next-gen cohort. Client reviews name Little directly across all testimonials, suggesting a concentrated relationship model rather than a distributed book of business. Structurally, Serenity operates as a boutique RIA with no adjacent vehicles, no disclosed institutional limited partners, and no family-office charter — yet the bundled CFP-fiduciary-plus-coordination mandate creates an architecture that competes with multi-family-office planning layers at a smaller asset threshold. The differentiator is the refusal to separate investment advice from tax preparation or estate mapping: the firm includes those services for qualifying clients at no additional fee, absorbing coordination cost to eliminate referral handoffs. Succession planning is not publicly addressed.