Who we work with
Our clients have done well. Most are retired or close to it; some are still working and would rather spend their time elsewhere. What they want is to hand off the keeping-track without handing off the decisions.
Three situations come up again and again.
One of you has always handled the money.
It worked for decades. Now you’d both like the other to understand it and be ready. Here’s how that works with us. Both of you know us, not just one. Every decision is written down with the reasons, in plain language. The one who hasn’t been running things gets meetings of their own with us, at their own pace, with nobody else’s questions in the way. If something happens to either of you, nothing starts from zero.
You’re on your own now.
After losing your spouse or ending a marriage. Maybe you ran the finances, maybe you didn’t. Either way there’s more on your plate than there used to be, and fewer people to think it through with. We sit beside you, sort out what’s there, and make sure the people advising you are talking to each other.
You’ve run it yourself for years.
And you’d rather not be the one who has to remember everything. You keep the decisions. We take the oversight.
We work best with households with a net worth of at least $2.5 million, not counting the home. We’re a small firm by design and take on a handful of new families each year. Good advice depends on the whole picture, so we’ll ask to see all of it.
One couple’s first four months
A couple came to us this summer, both retired, with a state pension, Social Security, and savings spread across three custodians and an old 401(k). They’d saved their whole lives, carefully. The question they brought was when to stop saving and start spending, and how much.
We built the plan around three things they named: enough coming in each month to live the way they live now, the big trip every year instead of every other, and a reserve for work on the house. Tested against a wide range of market outcomes, the plan showed all three funded with margin to spare. That answered the question they came with.
Three things came out of the work around it. Their retirement accounts were set to pass to family and everything else to three charities. We recommended the reverse. A charity pays no income tax on a traditional IRA; a person who inherits one generally pays income tax on what comes out, while a person who inherits a brokerage account generally owes nothing on the gain built up to that date. Same gifts, same people, and more of the money lands where they meant it to.
The wills themselves were sound, but the living wills they referred to weren’t in the binder, so we asked their attorney. His answer was that they didn’t need them: their health care powers of attorney already gave their agents that authority. What they did need were fresh powers of attorney, because, as he put it, banks and brokerage firms balk at forms that old. He drafted both. And they had no umbrella liability policy. When the insurer needed them on the line to write one, we set up the call and sat in on it together.
The umbrella policy is in place. The new powers of attorney are signed. The beneficiary decision is theirs to make, with the numbers in front of them.