Wealth & Estate Articles
Practical explainers and guidance for wealth & estate decisions.
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Should You Keep Business and Personal Bank Accounts Separate?
Keeping business and personal bank accounts separate helps with bookkeeping, taxes, owner pay, cash reserves, liability discipline, deposit insurance review, and knowing what money can safely leave the company.
Wealth & Estate
How Should Business Owners Think About Personal Wealth?
For a business owner, the business can be income source, largest asset, concentration risk, retirement plan, estate asset, and family legacy at the same time. The personal plan has to account for all of those roles.
Small Business
Should You Use a Business Line of Credit or Keep More Cash?
A business line of credit can help with short-term timing gaps, but it should not replace the cash reserve needed for payroll, taxes, vendors, debt, seasonality, and owner income pressure.
Small Business
How Much Cash Should a Small Business Keep in Reserve?
A small-business cash reserve should cover the obligations that cannot wait: payroll, taxes, rent, vendors, debt, insurance, inventory, seasonality, and owner income pressure.
Wealth & Estate
How Should Business Owners Plan for Succession?
Business succession planning is not only about who gets the company someday. It is about ownership, management, valuation, tax, liquidity, insurance, family expectations, and what happens if the owner leaves sooner than planned.
Wealth & Estate
What Is a Buy-Sell Agreement and When Do Business Owners Need One?
A buy-sell agreement helps business owners decide in advance what happens to an ownership interest after death, disability, retirement, divorce, dispute, or sale. It matters most when the business is also a personal wealth and estate-planning asset.
Insurance
How Much Disability Insurance Do Business Owners Need?
Business owners may need to protect more than personal income. A disability can also pressure payroll, rent, debt guarantees, customer relationships, business value, and buy-sell terms.
Wealth & Estate
How to Manage a Concentrated Stock Position
A concentrated stock position is not just an investment question. It can affect household risk, taxes, retirement timing, charitable planning, estate decisions, and how much one company is allowed to control the plan.
Wealth & Estate
How a Step-Up in Basis Affects Heirs
A step-up in basis can reduce capital gains for heirs who inherit appreciated property, but the rule depends on the asset type, valuation date, records, and whether the property is later sold.
Wealth & Estate
What Should You Do With an Inheritance Before Investing It?
Before investing an inheritance, slow down long enough to identify what you received, set aside taxes and near-term cash, review inherited-account rules, and choose a plan for the money.
Wealth & Estate
Who Should You Name as Executor, Trustee, or Power of Attorney?
Estate planning is partly a people decision. Review who should serve as executor, trustee, successor trustee, power of attorney, and health care agent before treating the documents as finished.
Wealth & Estate
When a Donor-Advised Fund Can Make Sense
A donor-advised fund can be useful when real charitable intent overlaps with a high-income year, appreciated investments, deduction timing, or a desire to separate giving decisions from grant timing.
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