A young client inherited a substantial amount of investment and real estate assets from her grandmother. Being very young and inexperienced in dealing with financial, tax, legal/estate issues, her accountant referred her to me to help her manage the assets. With the help of her CPA, we were able to shelter a substantial amount of her assets from taxation and invest them to secure her future retirement and provide current supplemental income as she was building work experience.

Spouse who had been divorced for over 10 years delayed execution of a QDRO because she did not know how to pursue it with opposing counsel. We worked with her and her attorney to negotiate an equitable split and coordinated the complicated distribution paperwork between three financial institutions. We were able to successfully force six-figures of assets to be transferred into her name after decade-long delays, which allowed her to fully retire.

Client was struggling to deal with the passing of her spouse over 10 years prior, and in that time, had been pressured to upgrade her fully paid off timeshare ownership interests by the timeshare company. The monthly fees amounted to just under $10,000 per month and threatened to compromise her retirement within 5 years, a major issue that had been overlooked by her former advisors. We helped the client coordinate with her other new advisors to cancel her timeshare contracts, address the income shortfalls, and help her enlist the help of her children to gain control of her finances. Additionally, we identified mistakes in how her retirement account beneficiaries were titled, which could have severely compromised the eventual transfer of assets to her adult special needs child.

A physician couple who owned separate medical practices hired Point Sur Advisors to establish 401k plans for each of their respective firms. A complicating factor was joint interests in other multi-state practices triggering the need for controlled group testing and plan corrections. Point Sur Advisors helped the clients retain an ERISA attorney to facilitate plan corrections and bring them into compliance quickly, a problem that if left unaddressed could have resulted in large penalties. The same couple also had Point Sur Advisors review their old multi-million dollar whole life insurance policies which had become increasingly expensive to maintain. Upon review we were able to help the doctors convert the policies to more efficient permanent life insurance policies that increased their life insurance coverage from $6MM to $15MM (which also included $1MM of long-term care insurance each) and reduced monthly premiums by over 40%. Because of the better loan features and cash value design of the new policies, the clients were able to take short-term loans from their own life insurance cash value at a rate of 3% to 5% interest to complete construction of their new residence (far less than the cost of financing through traditional lenders).