Executives & ENTREPRENEURS

It’s hard to leave a business you’ve worked tirelessly to build, let alone create a path to a successful exit on your own terms. We provide business exit planning in several phases, beginning with a picture of what your ideal life after exit looks like. We compare the ideal to the current and look for ways to close any gaps over time while mitigating risks. Finally, with a strong team of advisers around you, we help see you through your transition and adjust to your new season of life.

As a business owner, your finances look different than other professionals. The flexibility and control you have over expenses, retirement savings plans, and hiring create a unique opportunity for financial planning. While many owners prioritize the business at the expense of their personal planning, we’ll help integrate and find balance between the two. We’ll partner with your corporate and personal CPAs and attorneys to optimize your personal planning through your business.

As an investment professional, you may have a substantial part of your wealth tied up in a series of private capital funds or strategies. While this presents opportunities, it can also introduce complexities, such as lumpy income, irregular cash flow, high concentration in a single asset class, and advanced tax planning. We integrate those factors into a family’s short- and long-term planning and broader investment portfolio.

As life evolves, so do your expenses. We help you find balance between living well today and saving for the future. While a tax return can tell you what happened in the past, we combine tax planning and cash flow projections to build a view into future income and expenses. We aggregate data from pay stubs, estimated payouts from deferred and equity compensation plans, anticipated liquidity events, and other income sources, and pair those with fixed and variable expenses. The result is a multi-year projection of free cash flow that opens the door for strategic planning opportunities.

With charitable planning, we help you address the how, when, and what of your charitable goals. By taking taxes, investments, and cash flow into account, we help you maximize the value of each dollar given, whether during your lifetime or as a legacy. Funding Donor-Advised Funds, gifting appreciated stock, reducing Required Minimum Distributions with Qualified Charitable Distributions, and utilizing charitable trusts are a few ways our clients choose to execute on their charitable goals. We work with you to determine the best path for your charitable gifts.

Verum’s investment philosophy centers around customized portfolio management, recognizing the unique aspects of your financial situation—from varied risk tolerance and capacity to objectives, liquidity needs, and desires. Our Investment Committee guides the investment process, crafting portfolios to aim for the highest expected return on a risk-adjusted basis. Our Advisory team also steps in to help tailor your investment portfolio so that it reflects the Investment Committee’s insight while being optimized for your specific needs, including accounting for your human capital in the portfolio decision making process.

See your entire financial life on one page. Our client portal allows you to pull in accounts from various institutions, including Verum investment accounts, to see your living net worth in real-time. The portal also includes a vault for data storage and sharing and even offers a budgeting feature for those interested in organizing their expenses in a more detailed way. No more tracking down accounts and files–it’s all in one place.

Executives are often faced with deciding whether or not to participate in their corporate plan and all that it entails. If you find yourself in this position, you may benefit from guidance that coordinates your decisions with the rest of your financial picture. Our deferred compensation and long-term incentive plan analysis integrates tax planning, asset location, investment allocation, cash flow planning, and risk management to optimize your decision making. We help analyze the details and lead you to the best option given your circumstances.

Because we have discussed and solidified your larger financial goals, we are positioned to also help you answer common questions around equity compensation. Together we’ll decide whether to hold, exercise, or sell your stock options, restricted stock, performance units, and any other equity-based compensation. We’ll weigh factors such as taxes, timing and liquidity provisions, reporting requirements, market environment, and lifestyle goals. We can help you work through each of these, carefully considering which tradeoffs you need to take into account when planning for stock awards and stock options. Our analysis ensures that your equity compensation becomes a powerful tool in achieving both near and long-term financial objectives.

Because there will always be uncertainties in life, we’ll help you think through your wishes for both the inevitable and the unlikely. Through partnerships with Trusts and Estates attorneys, we work with you to ensure your wishes are adequately documented and any tax implications are considered so your affairs can be structured as efficiently as possible. Once a plan is in place, we map out your estate’s flow so you have a clear and understandable visual to go with it. Once the work is done to execute your documents, we work with the attorneys to ensure account titling, beneficiary designations, and ownership are in sync so the plan works as expected.

One member of a couple or family is often the sole person managing finances. That is an overwhelming weight to hold alone. We help relieve that burden by getting families on the same page while consolidating information so that we can provide holistic financial advice. The sheer volume of financial accounts and details is a lot to keep track of. We aggregate financial data over time and fill in gaps as we discover them. You will be able to see your whole financial life in one place with our client portal, and store copies of documents in the electronic vault. We will continue to help you stay organized well beyond this initial step, because when we pull together a family’s complete picture, we’re able to give our best advice.

Something you may need but hope you never use, insurance is an important part of a family’s risk management strategy. Threats to a family’s financial plan include the loss of one’s income, health, or life. We believe that disability, long-term care, and life insurance should be considered as part of a comprehensive financial review. We will help you consider options that support your long-term plan and navigate the world of implementing efficient policies that are appropriate for your needs.

We merge the vision and the details to build a long-term road map for retirement, education, and major purchases. We’ll explore and stress-test different scenarios to answer questions like “How much should we be saving?” and “Are we on the right track?” We fine-tune and adjust this planning over time, acting as a guide through unpredictable markets and changing circumstances to keep your family on track.

Where does your investment portfolio stand today? That’s what we seek to answer with our portfolio diagnostics. We conduct a deep dive into your portfolio to better understand the risks and potential embedded within. The analysis is designed to help you visualize risk by showing how much your portfolio might have declined in previous stock market downturns. We also explore the current composition of your portfolio, looking at its mix of stocks across various sectors, sizes, factors, and geographic locations. This portfolio diagnostic is an important first step as we work with you to design the right investment portfolio for you and your goals.

Private capital can be a valuable part of your portfolio if you have the right risk tolerance and liquidity. Not all alternative investments are created equal, so we are exceptionally careful in choosing and managing them. We can design a comprehensive private capital sleeve in your portfolio, including private equity, private credit, or private real estate. If you need additional diversification and have the appropriate situation, we’ll invest in liquid alternatives.

Verum has developed robust reporting capabilities for alternative investments, offering a clear picture of your portfolio’s performance with metrics like time-weighted return, IRR, and multiple of invested capital.

There are numerous options for retirement plans that benefit you and your team. We can help think through those options and identify plans that suit your needs. Whether you’re a sole proprietor or have a small team of employees, a retirement plan can open the door for meaningful tax benefits. SEP IRAs, Solo 401(k) plans, Group 401(k) plans, profit sharing plans, and defined benefit plans all present different opportunities. We help navigate the selection, design and implementation of these in conjunction with outside administrators and recordkeepers.

Planning for your child’s education is a significant undertaking. In the face of rising higher education costs, it’s more important than ever that you have a well-thought-out strategy. We estimate costs and devise strategies to reach your education savings goals through tools such 529 plans, UTMAs, and family legacy planning all while ensuring balance with your other priorities and long-term goals.

Setting the vision is the first step in our planning process that helps us better understand what drives our clients, what they value, and how they envision their future. Intended to be a collaborative discussion, we work through a series of discovery questions provided to clients in advance that dive deeper into four key areas: work, leisure, legacy, and concerns. This step in the process helps paint a picture that guides decision-making and planning solutions that fit each client’s individual needs and wants.

Planning around taxes is paramount. We use prior years as a guide to design a forward-thinking tax-efficient strategy and use this to optimize your portfolio as well as year-to-year tax minimization techniques. Taxes impact everything: from retirement plans, to gifting and estate planning, to equity and deferred compensation. Together with your CPA, we generate and vet ideas that balance immediate and long-term benefits for you and your family.