Janet & Carla are cutting back on work and retiring over the next five years. Janet works as a project manager and will be able to leave whenever she wants. Carla is an architect working on succession for her business, and it will take a few years to fully “phase herself out” from her practice.
They currently have a condo in Portland, Oregon and a beach house in Gold Beach, Oregon. Carla’s mom still lives in Fort Lauderdale, and they want to buy a home there to spend winter times. They want to know how much they can make in offsetting Airbnb/Vrbo income if they finance the purchase of the home and rent it out part of the year with short term leases. They also love to travel in general and need sustainable portfolio rules for their travel expenses.
They collect art, give to charity, and don’t have kids. That doesn’t mean their estate doesn’t need good advice- they want enough income to live comfortably and leave a lot to the causes they care about- the Portland Museum, Lan Su Chinese Garden, and Mutual Aid groups.
Most of their money is in taxable accounts. There is a relatively small amount in a SEP IRA and each Carla and Janet have Roth IRA’s they didn’t fund much. There will be an inheritance, but the trust Carla’s mom started has started distributing income this year.
Orchestrating the income, expenses, investing vehicles, and rules for portfolios is the focus of Quarterly meetings. We get together to look at tax advantages of selling investments, consider new investments in Rental Real Estate (they don’t own any yet, but would like to), monitor Janet’s Coinbase account invested across various Cryptocurrencies, and discuss charitable giving and travel. The reports on tax strategies guide our discussion of what to sell and when, and monitoring reports help us decide if investments remain the relative quality they were when we bought them.
Carla sees a house on Redfin and sends an email link to Chaim with a note they’d like to see what it’d look like to buy this with 20% down- how much revenue can they really earn from this property with a buy and hold, income driven strategy? We generate a report over the next couple of days and get together over zoom to discuss the potentials.
This is mostly what the retainer model looks like. For people who just need a few hours of advice on getting where they want to go, we have hourly models and asset management models to consider. For those who want to be a lot less involved directly, we tend to recommend an asset management relationship (yes, we do this as well). We see the retainer model as a way to go in greater depth with clients who are looking to be deeply involved in an ongoing investment management process and have a fair amount of assets to tend. Those with fewer assets likely are best suited to our traditional hourly rate model.
