The Evolution of the Family Office Starts Here

Karen Cassidy
Family Office Director

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 focuses on the integration of tax, wealth, and risk management into one cohesive experience. Typically, in financial services, advice is segregated to very specific expertise versus connected across the different financial services disciplines.

Creating a cohesive and integrated plan can have the same impact once only reserved for the wealthiest. It is now available to every American family.

Why You Need a Family Office

We see that too many of our clients suffer from the conflicts, high costs, and inefficiencies that result from working with multiple, often competing financial firms. We have made it is possible for every American family to enjoy the advantages that were once only available to the ultra-wealthy.

Those advantages include lower costs, smarter tax treatment, and a holistic approach to preserving, protecting, and growing their wealth.

Our vision for a brighter future is to provide the professionals, the expertise, the systems, and operational controls required
to deliver the family office experience.

Latest Family Office Articles

Taxes Should Be Job #1

For many business owners, taxes can be their largest single expense—larger than qualified plan contributions, larger than their mortgage, and sometimes even larger than the kids’ college education. If taxes take the biggest bite out of your nest egg, your tax strategy should be upstream from your investment policy statement.

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A Nation of Emigrants

On February 23rd, the Pew Research Center found that 57% of Americans felt that dealing with immigration is their third top priority for 2024, just behind national security and crime. Four days later, immigration surged to the top spot, according to Gallup. Since January 2021, a minimum of 6.3 million people have crossed the border, according to the Office of Homeland Security Statistics, and cities across the U.S. are under tremendous pressure from this massive influx of migrants. This is an everyday story. However, lost among all the clickbait and headlines is another story, and we rarely hear of it: emigration. Many Americans are moving out of the U.S. The latest estimate from the State Department was nine million U.S. citizens live outside of the country.

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Six Reasons to Put Tax Policy Ahead of Investment Policy

Taxes First, Then Math is the decision-making paradigm of the ultra-wealthy, and for good reason. For several reasons, actually, and this blog will highlight some of them. Let’s begin with the core premise that the richest Americans overwhelmingly employ family offices to handle their financial affairs, and it’s hard to imagine a family office that does not have one or more tax professionals in a key client-facing role.

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Passive Investing Has Taken the Lead and Appears Unstoppable

As we learned in Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, life-changing events can happen in two ways: gradually, then suddenly. That is certainly the case for passive versus active investing. Vanguard launched its first version of an S&P 500 index fund in May of 1976, and it took nearly 40 years for index funds to claim a 30% share of the funds marketplace. Last month, passive investing finally claimed a majority of the fund assets under management in America. In the storm of cultural, economic, and geopolitical news, you may have missed the story, but for the investment industry, it’s a very big deal. It’s an even bigger deal for the American family.

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Four Questions Your Mutual Fund Salesperson Does Not Want You to Ask

Whatever your wealth journey has been, whether you’ve enjoyed strong year-over-year compounding or found yourself wondering if your nest egg will ever grow to a comfortable number, your mutual fund salesperson has done just fine, thank you. In this blog, we’ll provide four crucial questions you can ask your rep, but we’ll go one better: we’ll give you the answers you would really want to hear.

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Four Ways To Make Transparency Work For You

Organizational research has shown that a culture of transparency in the workplace is worth the investment. Data shows transparency fosters greater job satisfaction, employee retention, and trust, while a lack of transparency can lead to a breakdown in collaboration and disharmony. These same dynamics are in play in the relationship between financial advisors and their clients; trust in your strategy and in the motives of your advisors is downstream from transparency.

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What can you expect?

Proactive Tax Planning

Most financial professionals neglect this important discipline, but we believe that it’s not what you make, but what you keep that  matters.

Taxes are a drag on portfolio performance, wealth accumulation and lifestyle choices.

We will work to lower taxes in a way that is legal, moral and ethical.

Control the Controllable®

Historically the financial services industry wastes time and money on attempting to control things that can’t be predicted or controlled, such as market direction, volatility, inflation, interest rates, etc.

Our approach is to focus on costs, tax efficiency, diversification and maximum loss exposure. All these things can, and we believe, must be controlled

Multi-Generational Focus

Long-term planning is common among family offices, with a goal of maximizing the wealth transfer to succeeding generations or, in many cases, making an impact on society through charitable giving.

Risk Management

Today risks are magnified for the simple reason that you have so much to protect. Your wealth can make you a target, and the complexity of your holdings can create unwanted personal liabilities that can be managed with careful planning

Prudence & Discipline

As a general rule, family offices 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. Family offices accept the ups and downs of markets in ex- change for long term wealth building.

Best Interests Standard

Also known as the fiduciary rule. We follow this standard and put the interests and welfare of our clients first. Because we are Best Interest focused, we search for and implement only what we believe are the most beneficial solutions for the unique needs of the families we serve.