Inherited Wealth

Inherited Wealth

Artorius was introduced to its client by a Private Client lawyer who had worked with the client and their family for many years, assisting with the family’s estate and succession planning. The client had sadly lost her husband just over a year before, rather suddenly and unexpectedly.

Our client’s late husband had thankfully spent time working with their lawyer to design and implement a succession plan to be effective upon death for the benefit of his wife and their three children.

Unknown to our client, her late husband had amassed significant wealth through his business interests and investment activities. Upon his death, our client was stunned and overwhelmed by the scale and nature of the wealth she inherited. Given the enormity and emotion of the situation, our client decided not to do anything about the inheritance for a year as it was not something she had the capacity and desire to deal with at the time.

Upon engaging with our client, we learnt that she had very low levels of financial and investment knowledge as up and till recently, all the family’s financial affairs had been dealt with by her late husband. Appreciating this, and working with the family’s lawyer, and the professional Trustees who administered a Discretionary Trust for the benefit of our client and her three children, we took significant time and care in acquainting her with the assets she had inherited, and explained the rationale behind some of the arrangements her husband had put in place. Importantly, we wanted to spend considerable time in understanding what it was that she wanted to do with this wealth.

She had ideas, a vision and a philosophy that she wanted to adhere to, but no concept of how to achieve this. With patience and understanding we set about designing and implementing a wealth management strategy to meet her and the family’s objectives for now and in the future.

There were immediate liquidity needs to fund our client’s annual living costs, which included day-to-day expenses, school and university fees, travel and entertainment. Upon conducting a budgeting exercise and cash flow forecasting, we set aside a specific sum of capital and devised an investment strategy and implemented an investment portfolio with the aim of generating sufficient income, net of taxes and fees, to meet the annual expenses.

Working with the client’s tax advisor we established a tax efficient investment wrapper allowing for long-term capital growth and instant access if required.

We demonstrated to our client that she had significant amounts of capital available to her in her personal name for the remainder of her lifetime, notwithstanding the Discretionary Trust that she was a beneficiary of alongside her children. With this in mind, in collaboration with the Trustees, we implemented a bespoke Strategic Asset Allocation for the Trust and a subsequent investment strategy that focussed on long term capital growth from which her children could benefit from in the future.

We initiated preparing quarterly consolidated reports of the family wealth. This reporting provides our client with a clear and concise understanding of what wealth she and the family have, how it is composed and importantly how it is performing. These reports are reviewed with her and her advisors at the quarterly review meetings we host.

Our client decided she did not want to continue living in the current family home and with the help of our Real Estate Advisory team we coordinated the sale of the property, and found a new home for the family to move into. In addition, our Real Estate team sourced an apartment to buy for the eldest child who recently started working in central London.

Working with the client’s tax and legal advisors, we coordinated a review of her Wills and Lasting Power of Attorneys to ensure they were up-to-date and reflective of her new circumstances.

We reviewed and effected changes to our client’s Life Insurance provisions for the purposes of ensuring there would be sufficient liquidity on her death and to meet any Inheritance Tax liabilities.

Our client was keen for her eldest child to slowly be acquainted with the family wealth. As such we run regular educational sessions with him, providing an understanding of financial and investment matters as well as encouraging him to join for parts of the quarterly review meetings.

Our client wanted to expand on the philanthropic activities of her husband and in doing we established a Donor Advised Fund (DAF) to benefit those charities that were important to her and the family.