Financial Planning

Our expertise lends itself to being the advisor that individuals need, whether they are planning for growth, succession, transition or acquisition. Our financial planning group helps both single- and multi-generational owners manage their personal finances and any succession or estate planning related to their family business. We understand the new tax legislation and are prepared to help you navigate the changes to optimize your tax benefit.

Smith Leonard is committed to the success of our individual clients and business owners. We have a dedicated Financial Planning Group, with several of our leaders holding CFP® or CPA/PFS designations.

Nobody wants to squander hard-earned wealth. Unfortunately, many talented and capable people do just that by procrastinating or taking valued assets for granted. Most important, succession planning is always complex and never trivial. Much like a jigsaw puzzle, you must put all the right pieces in all the right places. Working with a trusted advisor can make this daunting task a smooth process.

Protect what you have: the first rule of any strategic plan. After all, one of your biggest challenges is making the right decisions to pass along wealth to those you care about most. Understanding the significance of this issue, we will choose from the right mix of strategies that work to your advantage:

• Lifetime gifting
  
• Family limited partnerships
  
• Irrevocable life insurance trusts
  
• Charitable remainder trusts
  
• Grantor retained annuity trusts
  
• Qualified personal residence trusts
  
• Intentionally defective grantor trusts
  
• Installment sales
  
• Generation-skipping planning (dynasty trusts)

If anything is more important than building wealth, it’s taking care of it. We encourage you to create a comprehensive estate plan that may distribute wealth during your lifetime or at death, and to accomplish these strategies in a tax-efficient manner. But our family wealth team doesn’t offer standard strategies according to net worth. Like every client, each plan is unique and tailored to your objectives and goals. Initially, we will ask you to give us your distribution wish list, as if taxes were not an issue or concern. After listening and weighing your wishes, we tailor an estate plan to get the job done in the most tax-efficient way. However, we also present options that may deviate from your plan if we think the options would yield significant tax savings.

During our strategic planning process, we naturally partner with your other advisers – investment managers, attorneys and others – to assure that we properly administer any estate plan. Finally, we follow up year to year, to keep your plan on its proven track.