Taxes

• Tax Planning
  The Heritage Design process essentially brings interested client families a coherent organized way to recognize and attempt to instill in their own families, the family unity and stewardship fostering practices employed by the ten percent that effectively dodged the Midas Curse “bullet”. Contrary to popular belief, when very successful families fall apart it is not typically primarily due to poor tradition estate or tax planning. Rather, it is more commonly due to unprepared heirs and the fatal discontinuity that creates.
• Income Tax

Investment

• Investment Management
  As referenced in the Philosophy section of this website, IMC’s origins were in the institutional investing world. Pension committees for large corporate retirement plans recognized the need to level the playing field knowledge and understanding-wise, between themselves as typically corporate executives/business people and the multitude of specialist professional money managers constantly “parading” in front of them in search of assignments. The essential problem they faced was one economists know as asymmetry of information, and the degree of asymmetry of information between these purveyors of and consumers of investment management services was daunting to the point of overwhelming. In fact, just the specialized nature of investment management jargon and the statistical torturing of data alone were enough to leave even fairly business and finance savvy pension committees in a constant state of lurch, wondering if they were doing the right things. This reality spawned the investment management consulting profession in the United States in the last few decades of the 20th century.  For more on this notion of asymmetrical information between buyer and seller, please see the description of

Planning

• Financial Planning
  Heritage Design consulting and facilitation, another separate fee-for service offering of our firm, is probably best viewed from the perspective of our personal financial planning (PFP) lead offering and core competency as being a very specialized, and at the same time very important aspect of the estate planning subset of traditional PFP. For context on this reference, please see the description of our PFP offering under Services.
• Retirement Planning
  Investment management consulting, as distinct from investment management, derives historically from the institutional practices of large corporate pension plans whose investment committees have long required professional consulting support to reliably execute their prudent investor mandate. Broadly speaking, that mandate involves developing investment policies, specifying investment assignments, properly letting those assignments to capable investment managers, and monitoring results. Over the last decade or two, technology has enabled these formerly primarily institutional practices to be translatable, in a value-adding manner, at the level of individual investing.
• Asset Management
  From a reductionist standpoint, all of money management can, for practical purposes, be distilled down to two separate things, i.e., how active or passive one is with respect to security selection (what to own), and how active or passive one is with respect to market timing (when to own it).  So, overall, as investment management consultants, we generally lean towards a low cost, very highly diversified, multi-factor, structured approach to investment management and advise utilization of active security selection on a limited and very selective basis.  With respect to equity market timing, we generally believe that type of activity is best relegated to the margins of investment decision making.  Put perhaps overly simply, yet in a manner we believe helps to make the point, we typically advise that our long term investment clients "Own almost everything, almost all the time."  What varies most from one client to another or from one account to another is the degree of equity investedness reflected in the portfolio's asset allocation policy.  We typically encourage our clients to invest, by policy, no more in stocks than they are comfortable having exposed to downside market risk during severe bear market periods where those equity prices may be cut in half or more.