David is a 54-year-old university professor and biotechnology innovator and consultant with several patents to his name. He’s married to his high school sweetheart and together they’ve raised three children, who are now all working young professionals.

Over the last three decades David has built significant wealth and he figures that, if he continues to work, commercialize his innovations and invest, he’ll be able to enjoy an upscale lifestyle in retirement and still have enough to give each of his children a significant inheritance.

Nonetheless when David met for the first time with the team at Rubach Wealth, he revealed he was worried and not really sure about his “real financial situation.” With his investments “all over the place” – in real estate, his patents and various investment accounts – he didn’t have a clear picture of his net worth. All his plans for today and the future were in essence, based only on his own loose estimate of his wealth. Could David and his wife outlive their savings? The last thing they wanted was to become a burden on their children later on.

Here’s how Rubach Wealth helped David.

• A clear wealth picture. After speaking with David and his wife about their plans and goals for the short, mid and long term, we advanced to the next stage of discovery. With the help of his accountant, we created an inventory of all his assets and liabilities. For the first time in a long time, David had a complete picture of his wealth.

• A large mortgage. After buying the house of their dreams a few years ago, David and his wife had a large mortgage that would not be paid off for another twenty-plus years. We brought in our mortgage consultant and he helped them structure this debt differently.  They’re now expected to be mortgage-free in less than six years, a timeline that coincides with the couple’s retirement schedule.

• Simplified investments. We analyzed David’s investment accounts and found that in addition to the various management fees that eroded his returns, his entire portfolio was a jumble of redundancies and contradictory strategies, and there were missed opportunities to reduce his tax liabilities. Now they have a clear asset allocation strategy, and we work with their asset management team to make sure their portfolios continue to align with the financial plan we prepared for them. 

• Optimized for tax efficiencies. We brought in our tax team to help David structure certain trusts and corporations so he could flow income in a tax-efficient way. We worked on a corporate reorganization to separate David’s consulting activities from his biotechnology innovations. This allowed him to take advantage of lower corporate taxes while reducing his personal income tax. This work has also ensured David’s family doesn’t get a big tax bill upon his death.

• An updated and adequately funded will. David’s will provided generously for his wife and children and included monetary gifts to two universities. The problem was, if David had died the next day, the net value of his assets would not be enough to fund the provisions in his will. We worked with a wills and estate planning lawyer to update David and his wife’s wills to align their wishes with their assets and also created secondary wills for further planning.

Many surprises – including a really big one

David found surprises at almost every stage in our process – from seeing his complete wealth picture to learning his will was under-funded. But one surprise proved to be the biggest and the best of all. Because of all the work we had done to condense David’s mortgage, put his investments under better management and reduce his taxes, we were able to boost the projection for his long-term asset growth. Where he thought he would be leaving about $8 million* to his heirs, he was surprised to learn that, over the next decades, his wealth could grow to as much as $32 million. That gave him the peace of mind he was looking for… and more.

*in today’s dollars.