A widow with an estate in excess of $3 million sought our assistance to organize and simplify her affairs. Her financial assets, spread among more than fifty individual stocks and concentrated in just a few, needed diversification to reduce risk. She was charitably inclined.
We suggested she consider establishing a charitable remainder trust to defer income tax and include gifts to charity, consistent with her intent to leave a legacy. After creation of the trust we helped select particular stocks suitable for transfer to the trust to maximize tax deferral. We developed an appropriate investment policy, helped her with paperwork to establish trust accounts, and then implemented the new investment plan with low cost, tax-efficient asset class mutual and exchange-traded funds to reduce risk through diversification.