About Ashgrove

Independence should be structural, not just claimed on a homepage.

We're a fee-only advisory built on a simple premise: an advisor who can't be paid by a fund company will make different recommendations than one who can. We built the firm around that fact from day one.

Origin

Started because two founders got tired of watching plans built backward.

Ashgrove Wealth Partners was founded in Phoenix by a former estate attorney and a former portfolio strategist who kept seeing the same failure pattern: a family would buy an investment product first, then try to retrofit a financial plan and an estate strategy around it. The tax bill, the mismatched trust, and the wrong time horizon all showed up later.

We built the firm to run in the other direction — plan first, then select the tools, tax structure, and portfolio that the plan actually calls for. That ordering is still the whole business today, whether the household is a two-earner family in Arcadia or a founder six months from a liquidity event.

Ashgrove is a Registered Investment Adviser. We don't sell insurance, we don't earn commissions, and we don't have a proprietary fund to place you into. Our incentive is a long relationship with a client whose plan actually worked.

What we hold to

Four working principles, not a mission statement.

Fee-only, no exceptions

We're compensated only by our clients. No commissions, no revenue share, no "preferred" products.

Fiduciary in writing

Every recommendation is held to a fiduciary standard, documented, and available for you to review.

Plan before product

We won't recommend an account, a trust, or a fund until we understand what problem it's solving.

Say the plain thing

If your plan is fine as-is, we'll tell you that too — even when it's a shorter meeting.

The team

Six advisors, three specialties, one shared plan format.

Every household is assigned a lead advisor plus direct access to our tax and estate specialists — not a call center handoff.

D.O.

Dana Okafor

Founding Partner · CFP®

Former estate attorney. Leads planning for founders, physicians, and multi-property households.

R.V.

Ray Villanueva

Founding Partner · CFA

Fifteen years in institutional portfolio strategy before building Ashgrove's investment discipline.

S.N.

Sana Nazari

Director of Tax Strategy · CPA

Coordinates directly with clients' outside CPAs on every filing-year decision, not just April.

T.H.

Theo Halvorsen

Senior Advisor · CFP®

Leads planning for households navigating retirement, downsizing, and long-term care decisions.

M.P.

Mireille Pascal

Estate & Trust Counsel Liaison, JD

Works alongside outside estate attorneys to keep documents synced with the financial plan.

J.K.

Jonah Krebs

Client Service Director

Your fastest line to a real person — scheduling, transfers, and paperwork, handled directly.