Complex wealth requires more than separate advisors.
Wealth rarely fails because one professional did not know his or her job. Problems arise when real estate, insurance, business interests, estate planning and investment decisions are made independently.
Excellent professionals. Different lenses.
Affluent families often have excellent professionals around them: attorneys, CPAs, investment advisers, insurance professionals, real estate brokers, bankers and business consultants.
The challenge is that each professional may naturally see the family’s circumstances through a different lens.
- The attorneyLegal structure
- The CPATax consequences
- The investment adviserThe portfolio
- The insurance professionalRisk and liquidity
- The real estate professionalProperty
- The business adviserThe enterprise
Yet the family owns one interconnected financial life.
ARH Global Advisors LLC provides fiduciary-focused advisory and coordination designed to help clients see that complete picture.
Our role is to help connect them.
Our role is not to replace your attorney, CPA, investment adviser or other licensed professional.
We work with clients and their existing professional advisers to identify where decisions involving real estate, insurance, business interests, estate planning, liquidity and family objectives intersect.
Before a major financial decision is implemented, we help clients consider how that decision may affect the other components of their wealth.
The objective is straightforward:
A real estate sale can create tax, liquidity and investment consequences.
A business transition can affect estate planning, insurance needs and family succession.
An estate plan can look excellent on paper but encounter practical difficulties when an estate consists primarily of illiquid businesses and real property.
An insurance policy can provide valuable liquidity, but its ownership, beneficiaries and purpose should align with the client’s broader planning structure.
These decisions should not exist in separate silos.
One Family. One Balance Sheet. Multiple Advisors.
For families with significant or complicated assets, wealth frequently extends far beyond an investment portfolio. It may include:
- Residential and investment real estate
- Closely held businesses
- Trust interests
- Life insurance
- Retirement assets
- Marketable investments
- Private investments
- Family partnerships and LLCs
- Debt and lending relationships
- Future inheritances
- Charitable objectives
- Multigenerational family responsibilities
Each asset can have different ownership, liquidity, tax, risk and succession considerations.
Our fiduciary advisory process looks across those categories to help clients understand how the pieces interact.
We then help coordinate the appropriate professionals when specialized legal, tax, investment, insurance or real estate advice is required.
The questions that fall between disciplines.
We use the term fiduciary advisory to describe a decision-making framework centered on stewardship, transparency, coordination and the client’s objectives.
It begins by asking questions that may fall between traditional professional disciplines.
- Who owns the asset?
- Who controls it?
- Who benefits from it?
- How liquid is it?
- What happens to it if the owner dies or becomes incapacitated?
- How does it interact with the client’s estate plan?
- What risks have been transferred through insurance, and what risks remain?
- What professionals need to participate before a decision is made?
- Does the family’s legal structure match the economic reality of its assets?
- Will today’s decision create a problem five, ten or twenty years from now?
Those questions are particularly important when substantial wealth is concentrated in real estate, privately held businesses or other illiquid assets.
From the complete picture to the appropriate professional.
Understand the Family Balance Sheet
We begin with the complete financial picture rather than an individual product or transaction.
That may include reviewing the client’s real estate, business interests, insurance, investment relationships, liabilities, trusts and other significant assets.
The purpose is not simply to calculate net worth. It is to understand how the wealth is structured.
Identify Concentration and Coordination Risks
Significant wealth can create complexity.
- A family may have millions of dollars of real estate but limited liquidity.
- A business owner may have substantial enterprise value but insufficient succession planning.
- An estate may contain multiple properties but no clear strategy for managing, financing or selling them.
- Insurance may exist without being coordinated with the broader estate structure.
- Different advisers may also be working from different assumptions.
We help identify those intersections before they become problems.
Define the Decision
Major financial decisions should begin with the client’s objectives. Are we trying to:
- Preserve an asset?
- Generate liquidity?
- Reduce concentration?
- Protect a business?
- Prepare for succession?
- Transfer wealth?
- Sell inherited property?
- Provide for beneficiaries?
- Simplify an estate?
- Create income?
- Prepare the next generation?
Once the objective is clearly defined, the appropriate professionals can evaluate the decision from their respective disciplines.
Coordinate the Professional Team
Complex families often need several advisers involved in the same decision. Depending upon the matter, that may include:
- Estate planning counsel
- Tax counsel
- CPAs
- Registered investment advisers
- Financial institutions
- Insurance professionals
- Real estate brokers
- Property managers
- Business valuation professionals
- Trustees and fiduciaries
- Lenders
- Family-office professionals
ARH Global Advisors can serve as a coordination point among those professionals. We help organize the issues, identify questions that need answers and keep the broader client objective visible throughout the process.
Implement Through the Appropriate Professional
Coordination does not eliminate professional boundaries.
- Legal documents should be prepared and reviewed by qualified counsel.
- Tax advice should come from qualified tax professionals.
- Investment recommendations should come from appropriately registered investment professionals.
- Real estate brokerage and insurance activities are conducted through the applicable licensed professionals and entities.
Our role is to help make sure that implementation remains connected to the larger strategy.
Real estate creates a particular type of wealth.
It can produce income, appreciate substantially and become an important multigenerational asset.
It can also be illiquid, leveraged, management-intensive and difficult to divide among beneficiaries.
For families whose wealth is concentrated in real property, traditional portfolio analysis may capture only a portion of their economic reality.
We help clients evaluate real estate within the larger family balance sheet, including questions involving:
Hold or sell.
Should a property continue to be owned, refinanced, repositioned or sold?
Estate liquidity.
If substantial wealth is tied up in property, where will liquidity come from when it is needed?
Concentration.
How much of the family’s wealth depends upon a particular property, market or asset class?
Succession.
Who will manage the properties when the current owner no longer can?
Beneficiary alignment.
Do the next generation’s objectives match those of the current owner?
Insurance.
Can insurance provide liquidity or risk protection without forcing the sale of important family assets?
Professional coordination.
What must the attorney, CPA, investment adviser and real estate professionals address before the strategy is implemented?
From documents to implementation.
Serving as an executor or trustee can require decisions involving assets that extend far beyond traditional investments.
- Real estate may need to be valued, maintained, leased or sold.
- Businesses may need continued management.
- Insurance proceeds may need to be coordinated with other estate assets.
- Beneficiaries may have competing objectives.
- Liquidity may need to be generated while preserving long-term value.
ARH Global Advisors works with executors, trustees, beneficiaries and their professional advisers to help organize and coordinate these practical financial and real-asset considerations.
We do not replace estate counsel or the fiduciary’s legal advisers. We help address the business, real estate, insurance and coordination issues that arise as an estate plan moves from documents to implementation.
Your greatest asset. Your greatest concentration risk.
For many entrepreneurs, the business represents both their greatest asset and their greatest concentration risk.
Personal wealth, business wealth, real estate, insurance and family succession can become deeply interconnected.
Our advisory process can help organize questions surrounding:
- Business succession
- Ownership transition
- Key-person exposure
- Buy-sell planning
- Insurance funding
- Business-owned real estate
- Personal versus business liquidity
- Family participation in the enterprise
- Eventual sale or transition
- Coordination with estate and tax planning
The objective is to help the owner view the business not simply as an operating company, but as part of the family’s overall wealth structure.
Working alongside the professionals you already trust.
Sophisticated clients do not need another professional competing with their existing advisers.
They need their advisers working toward the same objective.
ARH Global Advisors is designed to work alongside the professionals a client already trusts.
- We may help identify an issue for the estate attorney.
- We may organize information for the CPA.
- We may discuss liquidity requirements that should be considered by an investment adviser.
- We may evaluate real estate considerations that affect a broader estate strategy.
- We may identify insurance issues requiring licensed insurance analysis.
And when expertise outside our scope is required, we believe the appropriate answer is to bring the appropriate professional into the conversation.
Coordination is the service. Judgment is the value.
Our fiduciary advisory work is particularly suited for:
High-net-worth and ultra-high-net-worth families
Whose assets span multiple categories and professional relationships.
Real-estate-heavy families
Whose wealth includes substantial residential, commercial or investment property.
Business owners and entrepreneurs
Preparing for succession, transition or liquidity events.
Executors and trustees
Responsible for administering complex estates and trusts.
Beneficiaries and inheritors
Suddenly responsible for significant real estate, businesses or financial assets.
Families experiencing transition
Following a death, inheritance, business sale, divorce, relocation or generational transfer.
International families and investors
Coordinating U.S. real estate and business interests with appropriately qualified legal, tax and financial professionals.
We believe sophisticated advisory work begins with a simple principle:
No important asset should be evaluated in isolation.
- Real estate→Liquidity
- Liquidity→Investment strategy
- Business ownership→Succession
- Succession→Estate planning
- Estate planning→Insurance needs
- Insurance→Liquidity
Taxes can influence virtually every one of those decisions.
And behind all of them are people — spouses, children, partners, beneficiaries, trustees and future generations.
The purpose of fiduciary advisory is to keep those relationships visible while important decisions are being made.
A client does not have a real estate problem, an insurance problem, a business problem and an estate-planning problem.
The client has one financial life with interconnected decisions. ARH Global Advisors LLC helps bring those decisions together.
Schedule a Private Consultation
If your wealth involves multiple properties, business interests, insurance, trusts or several professional advisers, we can begin by reviewing the overall structure and identifying where greater coordination may be valuable.
Important Disclosures
ARH Global Advisors LLC provides business, fiduciary-focused coordination and strategic consulting services within the scope of its applicable licenses and engagements.
ARH Global Advisors LLC is not a law firm, and its advisory or consulting services do not constitute legal advice or create an attorney-client relationship. Clients should consult qualified legal counsel regarding legal matters.
ARH Global Advisors LLC does not provide tax or accounting advice. Tax matters should be reviewed with a qualified CPA, tax attorney or other appropriately licensed tax professional.
References to “fiduciary advisory” on this page describe ARH Global Advisors LLC’s advisory philosophy and coordination services and should not, by themselves, be interpreted as a representation that ARH Global Advisors LLC is acting as an investment adviser or ERISA fiduciary. Investment advisory services are not provided unless and until offered through an appropriately registered investment adviser and pursuant to the applicable advisory agreement and disclosures.
Real estate brokerage activities and insurance transactions, where applicable, are conducted through appropriately licensed individuals and entities and are subject to separate agreements, disclosures and compensation arrangements.
Services vary by jurisdiction, engagement and applicable licensing requirements.