What is a Family Office?
The wealthiest Americans are also the most successful investors, and that is neither a secret nor a coincidence. We believe the reason is simple: they are served by Family Offices.
The Family Office provides advice and services that are far beyond the capacity of any one professional advisor. It requires a well-coordinated, collaborative effort by a team of professionals from the legal, insurance, investment, estate, business, and tax disciplines. With the CPA serving as the Family Office Director, we are at the core of your financial life, marrying proactive tax planning, risk mitigation and wealth management to improve our client’s outcomes.
This is the approach of the wealthiest American families and there is no reason you can’t benefit from it too. This approach often reduces a client’s overall costs, while making them more tax efficient so they can maximize what they keep, not just what they make.
As your Family Office Director, I am committed to assisting you in lowering your taxes, increasing profitability and growing and protecting your wealth.
Tax Strategy
We utilize proprietary, AI-enabled tax planning software to help us analyze tax returns and search for opportunities to avoid, delay, defer and minimize your tax liabilities.
Strategies sometimes create one-time tax savings, and sometimes produce significant savings year after year. Generally speaking, the more complex your financial life, the more opportunities there are to restructure things for your benefit.
We are members of the largest network of proactive tax professionals across the US, the Tax Master Network. This network of leaders gathers together to share best practices, develop skills, review news and trends in taxation, and collaborate.
Wealth Management
We believe that investing success is the result of risk alignment, tax efficiency, controlling costs, and diversification. Attempting to control factors that cannot be reliably predicted or controlled, such as market direction and volatility, interest rates, inflation, legislative actions, geopolitical events, and other economic events can be expensive distractions that typically lead to investor failure. We refer to our investment methodology as Control the Controllables®.
Behavioral finance studies the effects of psychology on investors and financial markets. It explains why investors often appear to lack self-control, act against their own best interest, and make decisions based on personal biases instead of facts.
The Dalbar Institute is one of the most successful and prominent institutions that studies the effect of behavioral finance on investment returns. Dalbar has discovered that the gap between the average equity fund investor and the equity market was 4.8%. For example, a typical investor who owned an S&P 500 fund returning 9% earned just 4.2% due to emotional decision making. (“Quantitative Analysis of Investor Behavior, 2020,” DALBAR, Inc. www.dalbar.com)
We believe that controlling human emotions utilizing our proprietary Real Risk system helps to better align clients’ investments with their ability to withstand the tradeoffs between risk and return.
As a general rule, institutional investors, family offices, and the ultra-wealthy, do not take uncompensated risks in their investments. They tend to avoid speculation, preferring instead to take an institutional approach to asset allocation and portfolio management. They accept the ups and downs of markets in exchange for long term wealth building.
Our practical experience says that 90% of investors are taking risks they do not understand, need, or want. Are you one of them?
Retirement Planning
Retirement planning is critical in these uncertain times. Whether you are developing a retirement plan for yourself or choosing a retirement plan to offer to your employees, we can help you evaluate the available options. Our focus is on helping you to make the choice that is most appropriate for your own financial situation. If you are choosing a retirement plan for your business, we will base our recommendations on the unique characteristics of your business and your employee population, as well as the legal and compliance issues related to each type of plan.
Risk Mitigation
We believe the traditional risk management model is broken. This is primarily because of siloed advice, high pressured sales tactics, and a lack of purpose-driven planning.
Wealthy investors have utilized risk management as part of a holistic plan to mitigate taxes, manage investment risk, stabilize income, and protect against the uncertainty of life.
When financial service practitioners act in a silo, they may solve one problem but may create other problems that jeopardize the client’s objectives. To avoid this, we utilize a multi-disciplinary approach that includes tax planning, risk management, asset management, financial planning, and estate planning. We feel integrated advice gives the clients their best chance at maximizing risk-adjusted returns and achieving their life goals.
We utilize a disciplined proprietary methodology we call Taxes First, Then Math to help manage risk.
Estate Planning
Estate matters affect everyone. By taking proactive steps today, you can ease the way for your heirs during a very difficult time. We can work with your legal counsel to help you to structure your estate and trusts to minimize taxes and ensure the smooth transition to your heirs. We are available to handle all estate and trust tax-related matters.
Tax Preparation & Planning
Effective tax preparation and planning can help you to minimize your future tax liability. We can help you proactively manage both your personal and your business tax issues, including understanding how upcoming business opportunities impact your tax status and vice versa. Not all tax planning opportunities are readily apparent. By having us on your team, you are more likely to benefit from those opportunities. We understand how the latest federal, state and local tax legislation and other developments affect you and your business and we are constantly identifying new ways to reduce federal, state or local tax liabilities.
IRS Representation/Tax Resolution
An IRS audit can be an intimidating and complex process. If you or your business face an IRS audit, we can bring to bear years of experience in dealing with tax matters and IRS audit procedures to ensure that you are properly represented when dealing with the IRS and other tax authorities. We can also assist if you find yourself buried in tax debt by using our expertise to identify the best tax resolution for your case.