A multigenerational family with over $70M in total assets came to Rubiq after years of working with countless financial advisors, two CPAs, and an estate attorney — none of whom were communicating with one another. The result was a fragmented financial life: overlapping strategies, uncoordinated tax filings, and estate documents that hadn't been updated in over a decade.

Important Disclosure: This case study is a hypothetical illustration based on a composite of client experiences. Details have been modified to protect confidentiality. The results depicted are not guaranteed, may not be representative of all client experiences, and should not be interpreted as indicative of future performance. Individual outcomes will vary based on market conditions, tax situations, and other factors.

The Situation

The family's patriarch and matriarch — both in their late 60s — had built wealth across three distinct channels over a 35-year period: a portfolio of commercial real estate held through a series of LLCs, an operating business generating $3M+ in annual revenue, and a diversified securities portfolio spread across multiple brokerage accounts, IRAs, and trust accounts.

Their two adult children were partially involved in the business and beginning to think about their own financial futures. The family had no unified view of their total balance sheet, no coordinated tax strategy across entities, and no formal plan for transitioning wealth to the next generation.

Specifically, we identified:

  • Seven LLCs holding various real estate assets — some with deferred gains from prior 1031 exchanges, others with significant depreciation recapture exposure
  • A revocable trust that hadn't been re-funded since it was drafted 12 years earlier
  • Three separate advisory relationships managing overlapping investment strategies with no tax coordination between them
  • Life insurance policies owned personally (not by a trust), inflating the taxable estate by over $5M in death benefit
  • No estate tax projections, no gifting strategy, and no documentation of the family's intentions for wealth transfer

Our Approach: One Roadmap, One Team

The first thing we did was build a consolidated balance sheet — not just assets and liabilities, but entity structures, tax basis positions, income flows, and beneficiary designations. For the first time, the family could see everything in one place.

From there, we developed a phased roadmap organized around three priorities the family articulated during our discovery process: protect what they'd built, transfer wealth tax-efficiently to the next generation, and simplify.

"They had advisors, but they didn't have a plan. Our role was to give them the first clear picture of where they actually stood — and where they were going." — Rubiq Advisory Team

Coordinating with Their Professional Team

Rather than replacing their CPAs and estate attorney, we positioned ourselves as the coordinating layer. We led quarterly planning calls with the full professional team — something that had never happened before — and created a shared planning calendar that synced tax deadlines, entity elections, gifting windows, and insurance reviews.

This coordination produced immediate results. Their CPAs had been filing entity returns without visibility into the family's overall bracket exposure. By sharing projected income across all entities and personal returns, in this hypothetical scenario, we identified over $2M in potential tax planning opportunities in the first year alone — primarily through better timing of depreciation elections and 1031 opportunities.

Estate Planning: SLATs, ILITs, and Multigenerational Structure

The family's estate was well above the federal exemption threshold, and with the 2025 sunset provisions looming, there was urgency to act. Working with their estate attorney, we designed and implemented a two-trust strategy:

  • Spousal Lifetime Access Trusts (SLATs): Each spouse established a SLAT for the benefit of the other and their descendants, utilizing a significant portion of their remaining lifetime gift tax exemptions. The SLATs were funded with a combination of marketable securities and minority interests in two of the family's real estate LLCs — applying valuation discounts that further maximized the amount transferred outside the taxable estate.
  • Irrevocable Life Insurance Trusts (ILITs): The existing life insurance policies — which had been owned personally and were therefore includable in the taxable estate — were transferred into newly created ILITs. This removed over $5M in death benefit from the estate while preserving the coverage the family wanted for liquidity at death.

We also implemented a systematic annual gifting program using the annual exclusion, funding 529 plans for the grandchildren and making direct tuition payments — strategies that reduce the taxable estate without consuming lifetime exemptions.

Investment Strategy: Consolidation and Tax Efficiency

We consolidated the family's three advisory relationships into a single, unified investment strategy managed by Rubiq. This eliminated duplicate positions, conflicting asset allocation decisions, and the tax drag created by uncoordinated rebalancing across accounts.

The new portfolio was constructed with deliberate asset location — placing tax-inefficient holdings (REITs, taxable bonds, actively managed funds) inside tax-deferred accounts, and tax-efficient positions (direct-indexed equities, municipal bonds, long-duration growth) in taxable accounts. We implemented systematic tax-loss harvesting across the taxable portfolio and coordinated all rebalancing with the family's annual tax projections.

Capital from the real estate entities was deployed alongside the securities portfolio as part of a unified allocation — not treated as a separate silo. This allowed us to right-size the family's overall exposure to real estate, which had grown to nearly 60% of total assets through appreciation and reinvestment.

The Outcome

Within the first 18 months of the engagement, the family had:

  • A single, consolidated view of their entire balance sheet — financial, real estate, and business assets — for the first time
  • An estate plan updated for current law, with SLATs and ILITs in place to reduce projected estate tax exposure by over $10M in this hypothetical scenario
  • A coordinated tax strategy across all entities and personal returns, with quarterly planning calls involving their CPAs and estate attorney
  • A simplified investment structure — three advisory relationships consolidated into one — with tax-efficient asset location and systematic harvesting
  • A multigenerational roadmap with documented goals, gifting timelines, and a clear framework for transitioning the family business

More than any single number, the family described the value as clarity. They finally understood how all the pieces fit together — and they had a team working in concert rather than in silos.