WHAT WE DO

“Pairing proactive downside protection for your investments with tax reduction strategies is the key to optimizing your wealth for future generations.”

- Lei Wang, CFP®, MBA, CFS, CRPC

REDUCE YOUR RISK AND LESSEN YOUR TAX BURDEN

For successful people, investing is only one piece of financial life. You also need help with tax planning, asset protection and estate planning. Depending upon your situation, you probably need to consider taking fewer risks with your investments, not more. Extra return is usually better sought through tax-efficient strategies.

But not all financial advisors are skilled in addressing your more complex needs. Few advisors, in fact, provide true estate planning services, and many shy away from more complex tax planning strategies.

Our team is structured specifically to offer comprehensive advice to high income business owners and other high net worth individuals. Through years of experience, we understand your needs and concerns. We’re well versed in the types of strategies that can help you reduce your taxes, protect your assets, and pass on wealth more efficiently.

Tax Reduction Strategies

The amount of taxes you pay can be a large factor in how much money you will have at retirement.

However, as a high earner, you have fewer options given the income limitations on IRA and Roth IRA accounts. Most financial advisors will simply have you position additional funds in taxable accounts and choose investments with some limited tax benefits.

However, this is not usually your best choice since you have to pay ongoing taxes on gains.

Our team can provide you with solutions that will allow you to continue saving money, but in a more tax-efficient manner.

Tax-Efficient Strategies to Optimize Your Wealth

We’ll help you analyze, plan and implement methods to reduce your taxes while sheltering your assets at the same time.

Our frequently-used strategies include:

Captive insurance, which often can help business owners reduce insurance costs, realize tax savings, and increase flexibility and control.
Land trusts can provide asset protection, increased privacy and tax savings. Trusts can also help mitigate tax increases from the state and local income tax (SALT) deduction cap.
Other types of trusts can be used for a variety of purposes, from asset protection to estate planning to charitable giving.
Social security strategies can help you take social security income and use it to fund a long-term solution for healthcare expenses. (See our video below for more details).

Full-Service Advice and Assistance

Because of our experience, you can deploy these structures with a sense of confidence. We stand by your side, providing ongoing support when you need it. We’ll also take on the responsibility of coordinating with your other tax and legal professionals to save you time and help ensure smooth implementation.

Our comprehensive services help ensure that all aspects of your financial life are taken care of:

Comprehensive financial planning
Ongoing implementation assistance
Monitoring of your financial situation as well as your progress toward your goals
Full-service investment management
A continuing focus on asset protection and tax reduction
Delivered by our fee-based, fiduciary team

FINANCIAL PLANNING & RISK MANAGEMENT

Your life is complicated. If you don’t have a solid financial plan in place, it can be difficult to consistently make good financial decisions.

That’s why we work closely with you to develop a comprehensive financial plan that reflects your values and your goals. Once developed, this plan plays an important role: it becomes your road map to the future.

The Financial Planning Process

Developing a sustainable strategy takes time since we must account for many variables.

Our first step is listening to you to find out where you’re starting from and where you’d like to go. Our comprehensive financial plan then typically includes a detailed look at the following areas:

Cash flow planning
Investment policy and asset allocation
Retirement planning
Insurance/risk management analysis
Tax planning
Estate planning
College and education planning
Charitable giving

We also stress test the plan to make sure it can withstand market downturns and common life events.

We’ll review the plan with you and make any adjustments necessary based on your feedback. Once adopted, we’ll use the plan to help monitor your progress as we assist you in moving forward to achieve your goals.

As your life changes, your plan will be adjusted to manage changing expectations and outcomes.

Our process gives you the peace of mind that come from knowing you’re on track to reach your goals.

Retirement Planning

As people live longer lives, retirement planning has become more important than ever. Even if you never plan to formally retire, our goal is to help you feel confident pursuing your dreams.

To help you get there, we take a holistic approach, with particular focus on a few key areas:

Maximizing your social security benefits

While not a significant source of income, social security is still very relevant. We see this as a unique opportunity to deploy this new income stream into a vehicle that can offer you long term benefits. If this is appropriate, we’ll help you implement the optimal strategy. Regardless, we’ll help you choose a social security claiming strategy that maximizes your benefits.

Optimizing your distribution strategy

The way you withdraw money in retirement can have a long-lasting impact on the sustainability of your assets. We’ll work with you to determine the priority in which your assets should be utilized for income.

Investing for sustainable returns

During retirement, investment risk management becomes paramount. We’ll take a close look at your current holdings and identify shortfalls or areas of risk and make recommendations to help you achieve your goals while minimizing risk. We’ll also look for opportunities to help you increase your returns through tax-efficiency.

Proactive risk management (insurance)

When you’ve got more, you’ve got more to lose. That’s why we don’t let risk management take a backseat. Instead, we’re always proactively looking for opportunities to help you better manage your risk. That often includes insurance. But all insurance comes at a cost, so you don’t want to be over-insured. We’ll help you create a plan that makes sure that the money you spend will always be put to use and never wasted.

INVESTMENT MANAGEMENT

As a high-income individual, you need more from your investment managers. With more to lose, strict discipline, risk control and proactive oversight are critical.
We understand your concerns, and our services are structured to meet your needs. We’ve spent two decades helping people like you invest better, optimizing wealth and protecting what our clients have built.
Our investment management services are focused on the areas that impact high net worth investors most:

Focus on after-tax results
Prioritization of conservative, consistent returns over excessive risk
Use of active, specialist money managers
Disciplined rebalancing and diversification
The addition of an additional level of oversight

Benefits of this approach
At many financial advisory firms, one person is primarily responsible for investing your money. However, individual money managers can be subject to the same biases as non-professionals.

To avoid this, we act as your advocate and help select money managers best suited to manage your portfolio. We then monitor the results and make changes when needed. This additional level of oversight adds an additional check and balance that helps ensure your investments stay on track.

Frequent Communication and Updates
Many people are frustrated when their financial advisor only contacts them to return a call. We realize your money is important and want you to feel comfortable, so we stay in close contact with you.

We’ll schedule meetings periodically to keep you up to date on your investments. In between, you’ll have ready access to all your information through our user-friendly client dashboard.

And, we’re always available to you by phone or email, whenever you need us. We’ll return your calls promptly within one business day.

ESTATE PLANNING

You’ve worked hard to build your wealth. When you’re gone, you don’t want your heirs to lose a large portion to taxes.

You can avoid this with smart, tax-efficient estate planning.

Few financial planners are well versed in estate planning, so it usually becomes the responsibility of an attorney. Your attorney might provide you with a perfectly viable estate plan, but may also leave something on the table because they didn’t see your entire financial picture.

Or, you may be left with a great plan, but no one to follow up once it’s implemented. In the case of trusts and other such structures, improper administration can put the entire structure at risk.

That’s why we help drive the entire process, always looking to optimize both the tax and asset protection aspects for you.

We’ll work with you, your attorney and your accountant to develop a suitable strategy, then we’ll take the responsibility to see it through so it’s successfully implemented.

We’re experienced in many common strategies, including:

Creation of trusts to hold certain assets
Reallocation of assets to children
Qualified donations
Strategic gifting
Use of life insurance

Contact us to set up a free, no-obligation consultation.