Editor's Note: This article is part of a Financial Advisor series "How I Solved It." Advisors describe a problem client and what they did to help.

It’s not every day that an advisor meets a client who is juggling a dozen 401(k) plans. When they do, as in this case, it’s likely that too much of a good thing has gone bad.

Bill Van Sant, a CFP and managing director of relationship management at Girard, the wealth management division of Univest, was approached 10 years ago by a colleague whose father was being bombarded quarterly with statements from his 12 different 401(k) plans. The father didn’t contact his plan providers because he didn't know what to say to them and was afraid of messing up.

His hesitancy turned out to be a good thing. Using incorrect terminology with plan representatives—who may ask different questions from firm to firm—could trigger the wrong kind of distribution and an irreversible, costly error, said Van Sant, who is based in Souderton, Pa.

“Once the toothpaste is out of the tube, it can’t go back in,” he said.

The overwhelmed account holder, then 55 or 56 with about $450,000 in combined 401(k) assets, brought a six-inch-thick binder stuffed with plan statements from the past year to his first meeting with Van Sant.

The man wasn’t a classic job hopper, although it might have appeared that way. He was an engineer who spent much of his career working on projects that generally took two to four years to complete. During the duration of each project, he became an employee of that company and was enrolled in its 401(k) plan.

The engineer, who became a client, told Van Sant that he was probably 10 years away from retiring. He didn’t know how his plans were invested or his plan balances. He had underestimated his total plan assets by $60,000 to $70,000, said Van Sant.

One of the plans held all cash and another was entirely invested in company stock. “There was no cohesive strategy,” said Van Sant. “The bulk of his retirement assets were aimlessly out there.”

The client told him that if he saw on the news the night before plan enrollment that real estate was performing well, he’d pick a real estate fund. The client made cash allocations when the market wasn’t doing well.

Van Sant wasn’t judgmental of the client’s lack of financial acumen. “People are experts in their field,” he said. “ I’m not going to go home and rewire my house.”

After evaluating the retirement plan where the client was then employed and seeing its menu options weren’t great, Van Sant told the client that he could roll over all the old plans into one IRA that would have one investment strategy and one statement. “He was thrilled,” said Van Sant, who observed the man’s shoulders drop as his stress level fell.

Van Sant sat for two hours with the client as they called all the plan providers. He made sure each rollover was payable to a third party so the assets wouldn’t touch the client’s hands and trigger tax penalties.

The client also owned company stock outside a plan. Van Sant devised a strategy to sell down that stock over a period of years in order to smooth out the gains and enable the client to pay off his home equity line of credit before retiring.

Van Sant initially put 70 percent of the client’s IRA assets in equities and 30 percent in fixed income. He toned back the allocation to a 60/40 split as the client got closer to retirement.

According to Van Sant, the client’s retirement assets have grown from about $450,000 to the $700,000 range since he started working with him nearly 10 years ago. The client is retiring next month and Van Sant is helping him navigate the waters. The client’s wife, who is also retiring, learned about her pension and rollover options during her exit interview for her job but employers often don’t provide this information, says Van Sant.

When the client of another advisor on Van Sant’s team abruptly told a plan representative that he wanted the $750,000 in his retirement plan, the distribution was transacted in a way that triggered a 20 percent tax. To reverse this, the client had 60 days to come up with $150,000 to put back in an IRA, says Van Sant. He and his team have become more cognizant of looking at retirement plans held by their clients and sharing best practices.

For wealth management clients, he said, “a little handholding” can go a long way.