For 25 years, Quinto Ambrosetti has worked with individuals and their families to oversee their finances and financial journeys. More than just managing his clients’ investment portfolios, Ambrosetti acts, in essence, as their family chief financial officer, addressing their financial goals and challenges comprehensively, planning, executing, and adjusting as “life happens” and their goals, needs, and plans change.
It’s coming up on two decades since I started working with this client. He was a young man with a young family and had come into a windfall. He had never had this kind of wealth and was looking for an advisor he could trust to help him manage it. I told him to think of us as his family’s CFO, the person and company whose job it is to shape their financial strategy and manage their long-term wealth.
We began with their financial plan. Over a series of meetings, we learned their goals and what they wanted to accomplish with the money, including both what we would consider attainable goals as well as pie-in-the-sky goals. We showed him how we would manage their investment portfolio, how our Asset Management Group as part of their HBKS team would determine how to allocate their assets, and explained that we decide on and buy investments with the understanding that the money has to last him the rest of his life. We created a plan to fund his children’s educations, set up retirement accounts for him and his wife, and brought in an attorney to help create and execute the documents for their estate plan. We worked with our Tax Advisory Group to address the tax implications related to the estate plan as well as the investment portfolio. And with our insurance professionals to determine what he needed to do to protect his family should something happen to him.
Developing the comprehensive plan took multiple interactive meetings and examining multiple options. Key to our role was cutting through the lawyer- and accountant-speak, making everything understandable and relatable to him and his family’s interests and objectives.
Two of their three children are currently in college with the third about ready to start, and their educations are already paid for. Plus, with so many years of growth of those investments, they will be able to fund their grandchildren’s educations. His windfall has been used to create true generational wealth.
As the financial plan provides for the income the family needs on a yearly basis, the client was able to continue to work, but on his own terms. He found jobs he loved, and when he decided to walk away from work completely, to free himself up to spend his time with his children, he was able to do so.
Serving as the family CFO means so much more than managing an investment portfolio. We’re a third-party advisor to them, working on their financial plan and managing the investment portfolio but also advising them on the wide range of financial decisions they make. Over the years those discussions have increased and have become common and regular. And if they need something we don’t do, we have the resources. Our partner firm, HBK CPAs & Consultants, serves as his accountants, and we collaborate with the CPAs on the tax documents needed to ensure his investments and other financial decisions understand and accommodate the tax implications.
In essence, we’re taking the detailed work associated with his family’s wealth off their plate so they can enjoy their lives. We’re the CFO, putting the strategy and team in place and keeping them updated on what each of us on their team is doing.
There are so many financial concerns people have beyond managing their portfolios, beyond the investments. They’re glad to be working with a person who knows them, who understands them and their goals, with whom they can have a long-term relationship.
important Disclosures
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