If you’re a high net worth individual, chances are you’re constantly looking for ways to preserve your existing wealth and boost it to new levels. Like other wealthy individuals, you may lead a busy life between home and office. Your financial assets may include private and corporate investments, properties, and businesses, which can be all too complex to manage at once. This is where effective wealth planning comes into play.
If your wealth exceeds $10 million, read our guide titled 7 Secrets to High Net Worth Investment Management, Estate, Tax, and Financial Planning to learn more about wealth preservation. For more comprehensive help, reach out to Pillar Wealth Management, an experienced wealth management firm that specializes in serving investors with $5 million to $500 million in liquid assets.
In this guide, you’ll obtain valuable insights into wealth planning for high net worth individuals. Let’s begin with why wealth planning is critical for high net worth families.
Why Is Wealth Planning Critical for High Net Worth Families?
Here are some top reasons why wealth planning is crucial for high net worth families.
To Protect Their Assets and Minimize Exposure to Creditors
Given the nature of their careers, professionals in sectors like law and medicine are often exposed to liabilities. For example, if a high net worth individual is a doctor, their assets might be at risk if a dissatisfied patient sues them in court. If this type of situation could apply to you, review your assets and make sure they’re titled in a way that safeguards you and your family from liability should you end up in court.
Wealth planning for high net worth individuals can also include transferring assets from your estate to a spousal lifetime access trust (SLAT), a grantor retained annuity trust (GRAT), or another type of irrevocable trust.
Even if you work in an industry where the liability is not as high, you should still be proactive and protect your assets from liabilities that stem from an unexpected event such as a car accident. For more insight into how wealth planning can ensure the protection of your wealth, schedule a video consultation with our wealth managers today!
To Minimize Stress
Wealth comes with its own complexities, with a myriad of assets to manage and obligations like taxation, business succession, estate planning, and investments, all contributing to this complexity. If this sounds like you, prioritize financial planning and consider reaching out to a financial expert who has served high net worth individuals in the past. They will give you peace of mind by making all your financial affairs manageable.
From helping you set your financial goals to organizing your assets and developing a proactive plan, they’ll tackle everything on your behalf. In the end, you should be able to eliminate all the stress you’ve been dealing with.
To Achieve Their Financial Goals
With higher volumes of wealth, high net worth individuals tend to have greater financial goals than most other people. Some may strive to complete a world tour, some may have plans to donate to charity every year, and others may want to become ultra-high net worth individuals. Without having a solid plan, however, people may have a hard time making their dreams a reality.
For wealthy individuals, effective wealth planning sets in stone how much money they require to achieve their goals. During the planning process, you don’t just define approximate goals but also personalize them to ensure that they will enable you to lead the life you want. You review and visualize them, ensure that they’re SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound), and align them with your values.
With proper wealth planning, high net worth individuals are able to achieve what they really want in life.
To Boost Their Investments
When it comes to investments, timing is a crucial consideration. High net worth investors typically have time on their side because they not only possess enough wealth to fund their retirement, but even if they need to draw from their investment portfolio, the growth of their assets will continue to exceed their withdrawals. This also gives them the opportunity to invest more aggressively than with a shorter time horizon, without worrying about market volatility. Also, they’re better able to monitor the performance of their investment portfolio.
But again, this requires active wealth planning. With the right investment decisions, you should be able to boost your wealth faster than you think. If you need help in growing your investments or optimizing the performance of your investment portfolio, you can go through our guides titled 5 Critical Shifts For Maximizing Portfolio Growth Strategies – For Families Worth $5 Million To $500 Million and Performance Guide, respectively.
To Pass Their Wealth to the Next Generation
One of the biggest concerns for high net worth individuals is seamlessly transitioning their wealth to their heirs with minimal tax implications. Therefore, estate planning is a critical part of a financial plan. The most important components of an estate plan include a will, a personal letter of intent, guardianship designations, durable power of attorney, healthcare power of attorney, and beneficiary designations.
With all these elements put in order through comprehensive financial planning, high net worth individuals can rest assured that their wealth will be passed on to their beneficiaries in a tax-efficient way.
Similarly, if they own a family business and want to ensure that it keeps flourishing after they exit, they’ll want to make continuity planning part of their financial plan to ensure that certain controls are in place for the subsequent owners.
Plus, if they seek professional advice, they should be able to benefit from more productive strategies such as the annual gifting tax exclusion of $15,000. To learn more about how wealth planning helps in transferring your estate, schedule a video meeting with our wealth managers at your convenience.
To Keep Their Tax Burden Low
While high net worth individuals are still in their working years, wealth planning helps them minimize their tax burden. This may have to do with optimizing their investment portfolio for tax efficiency, by deferring taxes, or by leveraging other tactics.
At the same time, most high net worth individuals don’t want to pass on an enormous tax burden to their children and grandchildren.
All these objectives are best achieved through proactive wealth planning.
To Fulfill Their Philanthropic Aspirations
Philanthropy is a common endeavor for high net worth individuals. Wealth planning helps them streamline their charitable gifting strategy to be implemented both during their lives and upon their death. Numerous tools and opportunities are available for high net worth individuals to gift to charity. For instance, they can create a charitable remainder annuity trust or donate appreciated securities, both of which are also great strategies to eliminate taxable wealth from their estate.
The aforementioned benefits of wealth planning can best be achieved if high net worth individuals seek professional wealth management services. To hire an experienced financial advisor, take inspiration from our guide titled Ultimate Guide to Choosing the Best Financial Advisor for Families worth $5 Million to $500 Million.
Now that you know why wealth planning is critical for high net worth families, let’s address your next query: “what do ultra-high net worth clients want?”
What Do Ultra-High Net Worth Clients Want?
Since high net worth individuals possess greater volumes of assets than other demographics, they receive greater attention from wealth management companies. But what exactly do those super-rich individuals want from financial experts? They demand more in-depth portfolio advice for their wider range of asset classes such as real estate, stocks, and, more recently, cryptocurrency. Some of the things ultra-high net worth clients want from their wealth managers include:
Digitized Services
With the role of fintech and other tech firms shaping consumer expectations for financial services, expectations from ultra-high net worth customers have greatly changed. While most fintech companies try to target a mass market, others are more inclined towards the wealthiest, such as a private bank named 220, which primarily focuses on millennial millionaires.
As fintech gain more traction in the financial sector, it is rapidly fueling the expectation of ultra-high net worth individuals to possess an arsenal of digital financial tools. Plus, tech companies are giving a further push with their financial apps with efficient dashboards, programming clients to expect services to be one click away.
The COVID-19 pandemic has also had a role to play in this trend. A joint 2020 survey by the global professional services firms, Aon and FactSet, revealed that during the peak of the pandemic, over 54% of the wealth management activities for high net worth clients happened online.
But at the same time, going overly digital on a wealth manager’s part can alienate ultra-high net worth clients. It’s true that many young millionaires demand a fully digitized private banking journey with some remote human assistance if required. But the majority still demand personalized experienced, such as via multichannel interactions.
Personalized Wealth Management Service
Given their more complex financial situations, ultra-high net worth individuals expect a tailored service from a wealth manager. Instead of a one-size-fits-all approach, they need greater attention to detail. Since personalized wealth management enables ultra-high net worth clients to obtain expert advice from wealth managers who develop a deep understanding of their financial situation and preferences, the service quality is incredibly high. The human touch that stems from a personalized wealth management service is the secret ingredient to successful ultra-high net worth wealth management.
However, most ultra-high net worth individuals aren’t getting this level of service, creating a huge market gap. Many of these clients experience a lack of proactive support and infrequent communication from their providers. If this sounds like you, seek advice from our wealth managers via a video consultation meeting.
Value-Added Services
More and more ultra-high net worth clients, especially younger ones, are willing to pay wealth managers for value-added services. Examples of such services include debt planning, risk management, business succession and exit planning, tax planning strategies, various asset allocations, employer-sponsored benefits, and so on.
If you’ve recently become a high net worth individual, you might be wondering, “Do millionaires have bank accounts?” Let’s address this question too.
Do Millionaires Have Bank Accounts?
The simple answer is yes, millionaires do have bank accounts. But they bank differently from other people. Before even starting to invest, they’ll typically have an emergency account. Some will keep a lot of cash in this liquid channel. In most cases, all their bank accounts are managed by a private banker, who might even be responsible for managing their wealth too. They don’t stand in line at a teller’s window.
Over 25% of their wealth, on average, is in cash, which helps offset any market downturns and acts as insurance for their portfolio. The rest is often put into various classifications of financial assets like mutual funds, stocks, real estate, and retirement accounts.
Conclusion
By now, you should have an understanding of the significance of wealth planning for high net worth individuals and what ultra-high net worth clients want from wealth management professionals. Whether you’re a high or ultra-high net worth individual, make your life easier by hiring a wealth manager at Pillar Wealth Management, a high-profile firm that specializes in serving investors holding liquid assets worth $5 million to $500 million. To learn how to get started, book a video consultation meeting with our wealth managers today!
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