Crestbourne/Services
Four disciplines, one balance sheet.
Most families arrive with an investment problem and discover it was an estate problem, or a tax problem, or a family-communication problem. Here is each discipline in full — what we actually do, who does it, and what it costs.
Portfolio management
Globally diversified, low-turnover portfolios built around your actual liabilities — school fees, a business sale, a fifty-year endowment — not a risk questionnaire.
We start from the liability, not the benchmark
Before a single fund is chosen we write down what the money has to do and when: the tuition in 2031, the second home, the gift to a foundation at your death. The allocation falls out of that schedule. If nothing is owed for twenty years, we can accept twenty years of volatility.
Where an asset sits matters as much as which asset it is
Taxable, tax-deferred and tax-free accounts each want different holdings. We site income-heavy assets where income is not taxed, harvest losses when markets hand them to us, and use those losses years later against a business sale rather than spending them on a rebalance.
Unwinding one large position without wrecking the tax year
Founders and long-tenured executives often arrive with most of their net worth in a single certificate. We stage the exit across tax years, use exchange funds or charitable vehicles where they fit, and hedge the interval when a lock-up leaves no other option.
Access where illiquidity is actually paid for
We allocate to private credit, real assets and buyout funds only for families whose spending plan can survive a decade of lock-up. Where the premium does not compensate for the lock-up, we say so and stay public.
What a portfolio year looks like
Illustrative cadenceAnnual review with the partner and the CIO. Allocation re-set against the liability schedule; prior year's realised gains and losses reconciled with your CPA.
Rules-based rebalance if any sleeve has drifted past its band. Cash raised for the year's known spending so nothing is sold in a hurry.
Manager review. Anything that has changed its process, its people or its fee gets a written recommendation to hold or replace.
Loss harvesting where markets permit, gifting executed before year end, and the following year's projection delivered before the holidays.
Estate & trust
Structures that survive the people who wrote them. We draft with your attorney, fund the trusts properly, and revisit them when the law or the family changes.
The most common estate failure is a trust nobody funded
An unfunded trust is an expensive piece of paper. Our first pass on any new relationship is a title audit: what is actually owned by the trust, what is still in a personal name, and which beneficiary designation contradicts the will.
Planning that reaches past your children
Where a family intends wealth to serve grandchildren, we model the exemption use, coordinate the drafting, and keep an allocation ledger so nobody has to reconstruct thirty years of gifts from tax returns after a death.
Donor-advised funds, charitable trusts, private foundations
Each fits a different family. We choose on administration burden and control appetite, not on which sounds most impressive — and we say plainly when a donor-advised fund does the same job as a foundation for a fraction of the cost.
Someone has to actually administer it
We serve as trustee or co-trustee where a family wants continuity rather than an unlucky sibling. Distributions follow the document, decisions are minuted, and beneficiaries receive the same reporting the grantor did.
The events that trigger a re-read
Any one of these starts a reviewA birth, a marriage, a divorce, a death, or a beneficiary who becomes unable to manage their own affairs.
A business sale, a large inheritance received, a concentrated position, or a move across a state or national border.
A change to exemption levels or to trust taxation. We track these and write to affected clients rather than waiting to be asked.
Three years without any of the above. Documents drift out of alignment with intent quietly, which is what makes it dangerous.
Tax strategy
Tax is the largest expense most families will ever carry. We plan for it across the decade, not in the last week of December.
A ten-year picture, not a one-year scramble
We model taxable income across the coming decade — retirement dates, a sale, the year Social Security starts, the year required distributions begin — and find the low-rate years worth filling deliberately.
Using exemptions before they are used up for you
Annual exclusion gifts, direct tuition and medical payments, and lifetime exemption use are sequenced so the family gives from the right pocket in the right year, with the paperwork done at the time rather than reconstructed later.
The structuring happens before the letter of intent
Once terms are signed, most of the planning window has closed. We want to be in the room a year early — for entity structure, for pre-sale gifting, and for the charitable slice that goes out at a low basis rather than after tax.
Your CPA files it; we make sure it was worth filing
We send your accountant a year-end package: realised gains, harvested losses, gift records, charitable receipts and the projection we planned against — so filing season is arithmetic rather than archaeology.
Family office
For families whose affairs have outgrown a single adviser: consolidated reporting, bill pay, next-generation education, and a governance forum that keeps everyone speaking.
One statement for a balance sheet held in nine places
Operating companies, real property, private funds, the accounts we manage and the ones we do not — reported together, quarterly, with a single performance figure the whole family reads the same way.
A family council, and rules for disagreeing
We chair the first meetings, help write the family constitution, and separate the shared endowment from money individual households may spend as they like. Most family conflict is a decision-rights problem wearing a money costume.
Teaching before inheriting
A structured curriculum for adult children: how the portfolio works, what the trusts do and do not permit, and a small supervised account of their own. Held annually, without their parents in the room.
Bill pay, insurance, philanthropy, private staff
The unglamorous half. Household payroll, property insurance reviews, foundation grant administration and the annual audit of what every account is actually costing you.
One fee. Paid by you, and by nobody else.
We are fee-only: no commissions, no product revenue, no platform payments, no referral fees. The schedule below is the entire cost of the relationship, billed quarterly in arrears on assets we manage.
| Assets under management | Annual rate | What is included |
|---|---|---|
| First $5,000,000 | 0.85% | Portfolio management, planning, tax coordination, estate review, quarterly reporting |
| Next $15,000,000 (to $20M) | 0.65% | All of the above, plus trustee services where appointed |
| Above $20,000,000 | 0.45% | All of the above |
| Family office mandates | Retainer | Flat annual fee, quoted after scoping — reporting, bill pay, governance and administration |
Minimum relationship $2,000,000. Fees are tiered, not a cliff: a $6M relationship pays 0.85% on the first $5M and 0.65% on the remainder. Third-party costs — fund expense ratios, custodian charges, legal and accounting work done by your own advisers — are separate and paid directly by you. We receive no part of them. Investing involves risk, including the possible loss of principal; past performance does not guarantee future results.
We are a good fit for some families and a poor one for others.
A first meeting that ends in a referral elsewhere is a good outcome. Here is the shape of it.
Where we do our best work
- Families holding $2M or more who want one firm coordinating investments, estate and tax rather than three that do not speak.
- An owner approaching a sale, ideally a year or more before terms are signed.
- A family in the middle of a handover — where the money has already passed, or is about to, and nobody has written the rules.
- Anyone who would rather be told plainly that a plan is wrong than be sold a product that hides it.
Where you should go elsewhere
- If you want a manager who will try to beat the market this year. We do not run that mandate and we will not pretend to.
- If you trade actively and want a partner in it. Our turnover is about 8% a year by design.
- If a single-issue answer is all you need — a will drawn, a return filed — an attorney or CPA alone will serve you better and cost less.
- If commission-based advice at a lower headline cost suits you. It is a legitimate model. It is simply not ours.
Which of the four you need is usually clear within an hour.
Bring the question that has been sitting unanswered. We will tell you plainly whether we are the right firm, and if we are not, who is.
Minimum relationship $2,000,000 · Boston · Charleston · Zurich