Wisdom

We leverage years of experience to provide personal care centered on thoughtful wealth management. Count on us for plainspoken, prudent ideas to safeguard your wealth.

Stewardship

Stewardship is not just a buzzword! We draw on the wisdom imparted to us and leverage the tools and resources at our disposal in every aspect of our client relationships.

Comprehensive Financial Advice

Financial planning addresses concerns and expectations about retirement and identifies obstacles that threaten success. Most importantly, it instills confidence and helps navigate the complexities of the modern financial world.

Goal-Based Analysis

This method prioritizes financial goals and determines the optimal funding plan. Financial planning is more than assets, investments, and net worth. It’s about identifying concerns, expectations, and fears – and creating a plan that provides clarity for a lifetime.

Cash Flow Analysis

The most powerful financial planning tool is the Cash Flow Analysis. This is where the rubber meets the road. The money you save today and spend over a lifetime is the single most crucial aspect of a successful financial plan. It is the one place in our financial lives where we have complete control over the results.

Tax Planning & Strategy

The difference between a good financial plan and a great one is often measured in taxes. For high-net-worth families, proactive tax planning — Roth conversions, tax-loss harvesting, capital gains management, and income timing — can meaningfully improve long-term outcomes. We work closely with your CPA to identify opportunities and ensure your investment strategy and tax strategy are always pulling in the same direction.

Retirement Income Planning

Accumulating wealth is one challenge. Turning it into reliable, tax-efficient income for the rest of your life is another. We help clients navigate the transition from saving to spending — developing a distribution strategy that sequences withdrawals intelligently, optimizes Social Security timing, manages Required Minimum Distributions, and ensures your income plan is built to last as long as you need it to.

Education Planning

The ever-rising cost of higher education demands rigorous strategic planning. What was once a ubiquitous rite of passage is becoming one of the most significant expenses for the American family. When starting a family, college often feels distant and like something to untangle when you’re no longer sleep-deprived. However, a comprehensive strategy devised early in a child’s life can provide the clarity needed to navigate uncertainty and attack the problem with confidence.

Estate Planning Coordination

A well-constructed estate plan is only as effective as the details behind it — proper titling, updated beneficiary designations, trust funding, and alignment across all accounts and entities. We work alongside your estate planning attorney to ensure nothing falls through the cracks and that your wealth transfers to the people and causes you care about, in the way you intended.

Legacy Planning

A good steward is responsible for those placed in his care and for those who follow in their footsteps. How do we ensure our children are planted on solid ground? Legacy planning is a financial strategy that integrates traditional estate wealth transfer with family values and principles.

Charitable Giving & Philanthropy

For many of our clients, generosity is not an afterthought — it is central to how they think about their wealth. We help families give more strategically through Donor-Advised Funds, qualified charitable distributions, and other tax-efficient structures that maximize impact without sacrificing financial security. Whether your philanthropic goals are large or small, we can help you give with both your heart and your head.

Business Owner Planning

Owning a business is one of the most powerful wealth-building tools available — and one of the most complex to plan around. We help business owners address the financial decisions that don't fit neatly into a standard planning framework: succession strategy, buy-sell agreements, key person insurance, deferred compensation, and the unique challenges of eventually transitioning out of a business you've spent a lifetime building.

Divorce Financial Planning

Divorce is one of the most financially consequential events a person can experience, and the decisions made during the process have lasting implications. Our team includes a Certified Divorce Financial Analyst (CDFA®) who works alongside legal counsel to help clients understand the long-term financial impact of settlement options, navigate the division of complex assets, and build a clear, confident financial picture for the next chapter.

Concentrated Stock & Equity Compensation

A significant portion of wealth for many executives and business owners is tied up in a single stock or equity compensation plan — RSUs, stock options, or a long-held position that has grown to dominate the portfolio. We help clients think through the tax implications, diversification strategies, and timing decisions involved in managing concentrated positions, so that a single holding doesn't become a single point of failure.

Life Insurance

Will anyone in my life be adversely affected, especially financially, by my untimely death? If the answer is “Yes,” we need to consider strategies to reduce or eliminate this undesirable legacy. Life insurance is the most commonly used tool for protecting us from this type of unexpected paradigm shift.

Long-Term Care Insurance

“By allocating nothing for long-term care, you allocate everything.” Long-term care (LTC) is the help needed for an extended period by people with chronic illnesses, disabilities, and other conditions. We can simulate various LTC scenarios, including current regional LTC pricing, to provide context for a potential expense not covered by Health Plans or Medicare.

Investment Implementation

Growing and preserving wealth is a vital part of every successful financial plan. Investments play a significant supporting role in this endeavor. However, it’s essential to understand the risks and rewards of investing, which can enhance or undermine a plan’s long-term goals.

Risk Analysis

What is too much risk? What is the level of pressure endured before decision-making skills fail? Great questions, but unfortunately, very difficult to discern. If you get this wrong, the potential for future lousy decisions increases exponentially. It's critical to uncover baseline financial standards that indicate an investor's level of investment risk or point of capitulation.

Portfolio Construction and Management

Strategic asset allocation is the philosophy that guides our Portfolio Construction approach. We focus on the big picture and think about investments on a long-term horizon. We use quantitative and qualitative research to inform portfolio allocation. Once the macro and strategic decisions are made, we make balanced, data-driven choices about which investment vehicles are appropriate for implementing the portfolios.

To further enhance our investment capabilities, Cottonwood partners with Opal Capital as our Outsourced Chief Investment Officer (OCIO). This relationship gives our clients access to institutional-grade portfolio management, research, and oversight — the kind typically reserved for large endowments and family offices — delivered through a firm that still knows your name.

Ongoing Portfolio Due Diligence

"Set it and forget it" works well for infomercials and egg timers, but not for investments. We apply rigorous standards when selecting investments for our portfolios. We draw on resources from Opal Capital, Morningstar, Lowry Research, Bloomberg, and several others to fully understand every nuance of portfolio components. By standardizing the constituent investments across our investment models, we can closely monitor performance, risk, and expenses.

Client Communication

Intentional and systematic communication is the secret sauce to any prosperous endeavor. Healthy communication is essential to any long-lasting relationship and, most importantly, cultivates more candid conversations.

Portfolio Review

Our responsibility is to meet with clients annually to review their financial plan, investment allocation, portfolio performance, and other relevant factors to confirm that all goals remain on the proper trajectory. Our staff proactively schedule the review meetings, remind clients of critical financial deadlines (such as contribution deadlines and insurance premiums), and follow up on strategic directives.

Advisor Coordination

All professional advisors (CPAs, lawyers, bookkeepers, etc.) and family members must be on the same page and aligned in their problem-solving approach. We take the lead to ensure the left hand helps the right hand. Without a conductor to unify the performers, set the tempo, listen critically, and shape the ensemble's sound, what happens?