September 29, 2025
Filed under: Concentrated Wealth, Wealth in Families
The Power of the Virtual Family Office Meeting
As we work with higher net worth individuals, the importance of coordinated, personalized advice becomes a critical element in the success of your wealth planning. Often advice is fragmented, different advice from different specialists, leaving you, the client, wondering what’s best to do. By bringing together your team of advisors, and including other specialists that may be integral to your wealth planning, you have the opportunity to get the benefits of “mastermind” thinking.
Bringing Together A Group of Experts on Your Behalf
Building a mastermind that advises and serves your unique planning needs is essential. Pulling together the right team isn’t always easy. By serving as your wealth “quarterback” or “conductor”, we bring together a team of subject matter experts, on a complimentary basis, to brainstorm planning ideas & actions that can assist you in protecting your wealth, save estate and income taxes, and take advantage of special planning opportunities. After going through our initial Discovery process, including your Communication Preferences, values, goals and needs, we have a good sense of what’s important to you and your overall financial/life situation. We bring that information together in a graphic that we share with your VFO. We invite your current advisors to participate for a 60-90 minute session, and where necessary, we bring in other experts to fill out the team to provide the most complete look at your situation. The session is meant to be a high-level strategy session. Coming out of the meeting, we have a thorough review of your financial situation across disciplines to bring to you for consideration and possible implementation.
Better Thinking, Better Coordinated Advice
In one such session, that included a tax advisor that wasn’t currently working with the client, we mentioned that the client was doing a teardown and complete rebuild of their current home. The tax advisor mentioned that through one of their other clients they had learned about a non-profit organization that is able to deconstruct the house, donate the materials and also provide a deduction indirectly for the labor that was used in the deconstruction, resulting in a significant tax deduction for the client. This idea created significant tax benefits for the client, the rest of the advisors in the meeting gained a new idea they could share with their clients, and the client ended up working with the tax advisor. A win-win across the board for the entire team and especially the client. As we talked through other planning ideas, we were getting real-time stress-testing and cross-disciplinary ideas that took into account legal/tax/investment considerations. Better thinking & coordination can lead to better advice.
Ideal Members of a VFOM
Selecting the right professional to come together for a VFOM on the behalf of a client takes some work. We always want to include the current advisors but we want to ensure we are getting the best advice. Ideal VFOM members are collaborative, top-notch experts in their field who work regularly with high net worth families who have more complicated planning needs. They are willing to donate 60-90 minutes to a meeting like this, on behalf of the client (or future client) because they also expect to meet new experts and are interested in continuing to learn about ideas they can bring back to their clients. The best advice is coordinated advice and this is a chance to make sure that our client has the best team possible.
The Importance of Coordinated Action
Advice is generally only as good as the success in implementation. After gaining some excellent planning ideas from the VFO, we bring them together with our initial wealth planning ideas into a single graphic summary called the Strategy Map. This strategy map covers the following areas:
- Wealth Preservation (Investments)
- Wealth Enhancement (Cash & Debt Management, and Taxes)
- Wealth Protection (Risk Management)
- Wealth Transfer (Estate Planning)
- Wealth Impact (Charitable & Family Giving)
- Life & Transition Planning
This Strategy Map becomes the go-to document as we meet regularly to review priorities and assess the value and results you are getting from working with Omega. With these priorities in mind, we focus on getting actions implemented, coordinating with other experts, and keeping you on track. The end result is not only a personalized game plan for your wealth planning but also a focused action plan to get you there.
The power of building and conducting the Virtual Family Office Meeting cannot be under-estimated. Better coordinated advice allows you peace of mind that you are bringing together the human and financial complexities of wealth into a simplified, achievable plan of action.
lisa