“How does the necessary planning continue?”

Ongoing Fiduciary Planning

Ongoing Fiduciary Planning means Pointer Creek takes responsibility for keeping the planning process active.

When your initial planning project is completed, you have an architecture from which to work. The next question is who will be responsible for keeping it current?

Who owns responsibility for keeping the planning process alive?

Project-based planning, that responsibility generally returns to you.

Ongoing Fiduciary Planning, you delegate the bulk of that responsibility to Pointer Creek.

Rather than waiting for you to recognize the next planning need, Pointer Creek proactively reviews applicable planning issues, identifies planning triggers, advances agreed-upon priorities, coordinates implementation and revisits strategies as circumstances change.

Ongoing Fiduciary Planning can take different forms depending on the complexity of the relationship and the responsibilities delegated to Pointer Creek. For some clients, that may mean recurring retirement, tax, estate, benefit, or family-planning coordination. More complex relationships may involve closely held businesses, trusts, multiple entities, significant real estate, charitable interests, multigenerational planning, and coordination among attorneys, CPAs and other professional advisors.

We refer to this deeper level of ongoing coordination as Family & Private Enterprise Advisory Services. All Family & Private Enterprise Advisory relationships include ongoing fiduciary planning, but not every Ongoing Fiduciary Planning relationship requires that level of coordination.

For a very limited number of families, the scope of an ongoing relationship may extend further into what is commonly described as a fractional family office relationship. These engagements involve a substantially greater degree of coordination, administration and delegated responsibility and are accepted selectively based on the family’s needs and Pointer Creek’s capacity to provide the appropriate level of service.

What Ongoing Planning May Include

Recurring financial and family planning reviews
Annual tax and retirement-distribution planning
Ongoing Roth conversion and tax-bracket analysis
Regular Estate taxation, liquidity and beneficiary intent monitoring
Liquidity and spending coordination for major items that impact retirement or estate planning
Implementation tracking and scheduled follow-through
Coordination with attorneys, CPAs and other professionals
Family and generational planning as it appears or changes
Monitoring significant legislative and tax changes, modeling their impact to your plan goals and/or opportunities or challenges they may create
Event-driven planning when circumstances change
Basic planning, critical documents, and education for dependent family members where appropriate
Customized benefit election and coordination with changes to employment or employer benefit packages

Unlike a project engagement, there is no predetermined point at which Pointer Creek simply hands the planning responsibility back to you. Our responsibility to monitor, coordinate and adapt the agreed-upon planning strategies continues, on a defined planning calendar with multiple scheduled milestones throughout the year, for as long as you retain the service.

When Ongoing Fiduciary Planning May Be a Good Fit

You want someone other than yourself responsible for remembering what needs to happen next.
Your planning includes strategies that should be evaluated annually or throughout the year.
Your tax, estate, retirement, family or business decisions frequently interact.
You want Pointer Creek coordinating with your CPA, attorney and other professionals towards your specific plan goals.
Your family circumstances or financial structure change frequently enough that a five-year planning event is unlikely to be sufficient.
You value proactive planning rather than returning only when you recognize a new issue yourself.

Ongoing Fiduciary Planning is generally priced using an initial design and architecture fee followed by a recurring advisory retainer. Pricing is based primarily upon planning complexity and the ongoing responsibilities accepted by Pointer Creek rather than net worth alone. Generally speaking, the initial design and architecture fee will be lower than a comparable one-time planning project, to offset the anticipated ongoing planning retainer.