Financial & Strategic Planning

Aspiriant’s wealth planning team provides our clients with best-in-class expertise and practices in the critical areas of financial independence and wealth accumulation planning, philanthropy, risk management, and wealth transfer as well as optimizing stock-based and other high-level executive compensation programs.  We develop creative, customized, and often unconventional approaches to identify and accomplish each client’s unique financial objectives.

1. Financial Independence
2. Risk Management
3. Stock Compensation
4. Philanthropy
5. Wealth Transfer

Financial Independence

Many Aspiriant clients are still accumulating substantial wealth from their employment, business, or professions. All of our clients, however, are eager to know whether what they have already accumulated or expect to acquire is adequate to comfortably achieve all their key goals. Through rigorous and iterative analysis, we guide our clients to reliable conclusions for managing the complex interplay of:

• Budgeted expenses
• The amount and timing of family and charitable gifts
• Whether to continue employment or business involvement or to “retire”
• What investment returns and risks to pursue… or accept.

Philanthropy

Many of our clients have ambitious and complex objectives for charitable giving. We create customized charitable giving solutions to optimize the combination of available tax benefits and use of financial resources in order to achieve social welfare and the personal satisfaction that comes from giving.

Our comprehensive planning process helps clients identify and prioritize their appetite and capacity for making charitable contributions. We then pursue optimal gift structures that can include donor advised funds, supporting organizations, private/family foundations, direct cash/stock gifts, and a wide variety of charitable trusts such as charitable lead and charitable remainder trusts.

These approaches often also accomplish other key goals such as portfolio diversification, intergenerational wealth transfer, and the development of a philanthropic ethic for the family’s younger generations.

Risk Management

Aspiriant’s wealth managers review all risks that clients face…property loss, liability, health, disability … and evaluate how best to manage these exposures. Often, clients are in a position to “self-insure” many of these risks. In other cases, insurance or some other structure is essential to avoid or mitigate the risk.

In all cases, we are very experienced in drawing effective conclusions for our clients…from simple insurance to domestic or offshore creditor protection trusts. Perhaps as important, we have no interest in any particular solution. Our clients can therefore depend on a thoroughly competent and unbiased assessment of their overall insurance portfolio…a combination very difficult to find anywhere else.

Wealth Transfer

Aspiriant wealth managers are expert in the broad array of estate planning issues and opportunities, including the use of wills and trusts, optimal forms of property ownership, estate and gift taxes, philanthropy, and strategies for property transfer between spouses and through the generations of the client’s family.

We work with our clients’ attorneys to craft and implement family limited partnerships (FLP’s), family LLC’s, stock option transfers, special needs trusts, incentive trusts, grantor retained annuity trusts (GRAT’s), intentionally defective grantor trusts (DGT’s), and dynasty trusts as appropriate to clients’ objectives.

Stock Compensation

In addition to direct cash compensation many of  our clients have compensation and benefits programs which include a wide array of 401(k)’s, deferred compensation, profit sharing and/or a pension, as well as stock options (both ISO’s and non-qualified), and restricted stock components. While these stock-based compensation components are potent sources of wealth accumulation, potential pitfalls include over-concentration in one stock and an over-reliance on the success of one company.

Aspiriant’s wealth managers can be of extraordinary value in this arena. We help many senior corporate executives develop comprehensive strategies for stock options, deferred compensation, and sales under 10b5-1 plans, hedges, and transfers. We coordinate these especially complex and tax – and regulation – sensitive elements as vital components of an overall financial plan.

Tim Kochis authored the book, “Managing Concentrated Stock Wealth.”

If our clients are not already represented by counsel, we can refer to a broad array of the highest quality estate planning specialists for the necessary legal work involved in this area.