The ways sound advice collides, numbered.

Engineering disciplines number their failure modes. Structural engineers classify the ways a beam fails; aviation classifies the ways a flight goes wrong. Financial advice has the same property — recommendations from competent specialists collide in recurring, classifiable ways — and nobody had numbered them. Rivalta does. This page is the registry: each class gets a mono RC code, a definition, and an instance grounded in a published comparison.

A resolution class is not an error class. In every entry below, each specialist is right inside its own domain. The collision is a property of the household, not a defect in the reasoning — which is why it recurs, and why it can be named.

Two classes documented. Both grounded.

Every class in this registry traces to conflicts the engine surfaced on published competitor sample households — the same runs behind the comparisons. No class is admitted on theory alone.

RC-001

Dimensional disagreement

Two specialists reach defensible conclusions — often the same strategic conclusion — and each is correct inside its own domain, yet the recommendations cannot both execute as written. The most common form: the same strategy recommended twice at different sizes, because each specialist sized it against its own domain's constraint. Neither specialist made an error. The collision exists anyway, and an advisor who executes both, or averages them by hand, inherits a problem neither specialist created.

// Documented instance — eMoney comparison · Price household

In the published eMoney comparison run, the insurance agent and the business-wealth agent both recommended hybrid long-term-care coverage for both spouses — one sized the benefit pool at $240,000 per spouse, the other at $480,000 total, with different premium structures. Same household, same run, same strategy, two sizes. In the same comparison, two agents independently recommended 529 superfunding for the same three grandchildren at materially different contribution amounts.

What the engine does with it Surfaced as a first-class conflict: the strategic agreement and the sizing disagreement both land on the record, so the advisor sizes the move once. The position not chosen is preserved as documented dissent, not overwritten.

RC-002

Reverse ordering

Each recommendation is individually sound, and executing them in the wrong sequence destroys the benefit — or invalidates the structure outright. This is a dependency collision, not a judgment disagreement: the moves are right, the order is load-bearing, and nothing in either recommendation, read alone, tells you which must go first. Single-domain tools structurally cannot catch this class, because the ordering constraint lives between domains.

// Documented instance — eMoney + IncomeLab comparisons

In the published eMoney comparison, the engine rejected “execute GRAT before dynasty trust” as ordered — the dynasty trust must exist before the GRAT can designate it as remainder beneficiary — one of 161 alternatives rejected with reasoning across the three households. In the published IncomeLab comparison, one of the ten conflicts surfaced was sequencing: Social Security claiming creates baseline income that fills brackets and compresses Roth conversion room, so the conversion ladder must finish before claiming begins — a window that closed at the client's claim date, with two tax years remaining at run time.

What the engine does with it Emitted as an ordering constraint inside the sequenced execution plan; alternatives rejected as-ordered are recorded with their reasoning, so the order not taken is auditable alongside the strategy itself.

The registry grows as cases close.

Two classes are numbered because two classes have comparison-grounded instances today. A collision pattern earns a code when it recurs across households and across domains — not before. The comparisons and the dossiers the engine produces document every conflict they surface, conflict by conflict, with the dissenting position preserved; these codes are the names for the patterns that documentation keeps producing.

The codes don’t change what the engine does. They change what you can say about it: “this household produced an RC-001 between Insurance and Business & Real Estate” is a sentence a compliance reviewer can act on, and “the ladder was an RC-002 against the claiming date” is a sentence a client can understand. Naming the collision is the first step in defending the resolution.

Grounding. The RC-001 instance reads from the published eMoney comparison (Price and Stein households). The RC-002 instances read from the published eMoney comparison (Stein household) and the published IncomeLab comparison (Smith household). All figures appear in those comparisons; none originate on this page.

Disclosure. Comparison runs are one analysis on one published sample household each; production output varies with profile completeness. Rivalta is not affiliated with eMoney Advisor or Income Laboratory, Inc.