Wealth Transfer Planning
Plan for the Next Generation
Support the movement of wealth across generations with strategies designed to reflect your family, your values, and your long-term intent. This may include trust coordination, beneficiary design, and structuring decisions that support a cleaner transfer of wealth.
Estate Liquidity
Address Estate Liquidity
High-net-worth estates often need liquidity to help avoid forced sales, family stress, and timing problems at death or after a liquidity event. We help design liquidity solutions so your family is better prepared when estate obligations come due.
Concentrated Wealth Strategy
Manage Concentrated Wealth
Many affluent families hold significant wealth in a business, public stock, or other concentrated position. We help evaluate ways to manage concentration, coordinate diversification, and create more flexibility without losing sight of tax and legacy implications.
Trust Coordination
Coordinate Your Trust Plan
For complex families, trusts are often a key part of the planning architecture. We work alongside your estate attorney and CPA to help align structures such as ILITs, SLATs, IDGTs, and CRUTs with the broader financial plan.
Liquidity Event Planning
Plan Ahead for Liquidity
If a sale, recapitalization, or other liquidity event may be on the horizon, early planning can create more options and less friction. Pre-event structuring can affect taxes, legacy goals, and how much of the event stays in the family.
Wealth Transfer for a Family-Owned Winery
The Situation
A business owner with children from a prior marriage and a new spouse needed a plan for family wealth transfer, business continuity, and estate tax efficiency.
Our Approach
Working with his attorney, CPA, and bankers, we helped coordinate a revocable trust, irrevocable trust, two irrevocable life insurance trusts, a business control trust, a prenuptial agreement, and planning for estate and GST tax considerations. We also arranged life insurance inside each ILIT, added additional coverage for business needs, and coordinated the banking needed to support the trust structure.
Outcome
The result was a more integrated plan to protect his family, provide for both households, support business continuity, and create a clearer path for transferring wealth across generations.
Legacy Wealth Transfer for a Multigenerational Shareholder
The Situation
A client held a significant position in the company his great-grandfather founded and wanted a more intentional plan for transferring wealth to both family and charity. The planning had to address estate tax exposure, liquidity needs, and how to engage his children in the family’s philanthropic legacy.
Our Approach
Working alongside his attorneys and other advisors, we helped coordinate a Family Foundation, an Irrevocable Family Trust, a Charitable Remainder Unitrust, and a Personal Revocable Trust. The structure was designed to improve tax efficiency while balancing legacy, family, and charitable goals.
Outcome
The client now has a coordinated framework to support multigenerational wealth transfer, philanthropy, and family involvement while creating a clearer path for managing estate and liquidity concerns.
Business Transition for a Family-Owned Company
The Situation
A family business owner came to us to prepare for an eventual exit from the company, with one child actively involved in the business and two other children with no interest in running it. The owner wanted a plan that would support continuity for the business, create a fair outcome for all three children, and reduce unnecessary tax friction in the transfer process.
Our Approach
We worked with the client’s attorney and CPA to help coordinate a transition strategy that included estate equalization planning and trust-based solutions such as an intentionally defective grantor trust. The planning was designed to separate business succession from family inheritance so the operating child could continue the company while the other children could be treated fairly through other assets or structured planning.
Outcome
The result was a more deliberate transition framework that supported the future of the business, addressed unequal involvement among heirs, and created a more tax-efficient path for transferring wealth to the next generation.