PRESTIGE Advisors provides informed tax-efficient investment advice. Despite their best efforts to retain and grow their wealth, high-net-worth individuals hand over much of their wealth to the government. The top 10 percent of the U.S. population pays the majority of all federal individuals income taxes collected in any given year.  For the past half-century, nearly half of all taxable capital gains were reported by taxpayers earning over $200,000. Today, investors perceive that taxes are preventing them from achieving their long-term goals. Many baby boomers  inherit assets and seek ways to minimize the tax impact.

PRESTIGE aims at every tax benefit to its clients. For example, the Tax Relief Act of 2001 has produced the largest tax cut in more than 20 years but it also is very complex.  It offers some truly nifty benefits but it does so in a very complicated way.  In fact, most of the benefits do not  become effective for as many as ten years.  The new law is 291 pages long, contains 85 major provisions and features 441 changes to the Internal Revenue Code.

Individually Managed Accounts

PRESTIGE Advisors are taking advantage one of newest available investment vehicles, the individually managed account. Newly empowered investors are embracing capabilities that were once the proprietary knowledge of industry professionals and institutional investors. Among the important changes for individual investors is the greater access to globally prominent asset managers who have typically managed the assets of the world’s largest institutions and the nation’s wealthiest families.

Known as individually managed accounts, this access allows individual investors to leverage specialized investment expertise and participate in a form of asset management that changes the landscape for investors who desire greater control and enhanced capabilities to achieve their investment goals. Exposure to such specialized portfolio management and unprecedented personalized service is allowing individual investors to discover what institutional investors have knows for a long time-that individually managed accounts offer enhanced investment control, service, flexibility and tax benefits to help them achieve long term financial success.

The structure of Individually Managed Accounts provides investors with a customized solution specifically tailored to meet the individual goals and objectives. Unlike mutual funds, these accounts do not commingle or pool assets. Rather, they provide direct ownership of the securities in the portfolio.  This structure provides substantial control, including the ability to incorporate stocks you already own in the account, concentrating on weighting of certain stocks and sectors, and restricting certain stocks or industries. Managed accounts offer a greater ability to manage the portfolio for after-tax return.

Investors can now customize their portfolio solutions to meet their individual needs. They can access information about their portfolio continuously.  And the portfolio is actively managed on an on-going basis to ensure it remains allocated in the optimized way to achieve the plan’s goals.  These services—PRESTIGE Advisor insight, a personalized investment plan, the selection of asset managers and portfolio management, trading and custody, on-going portfolio monitoring and management, and comprehensive reporting are rolled into an annual fee that aligns PRESTIGE Advisor’s interests with the clients.

Tax Efficient: No one likes to pay taxes and one of the main attractions of managed accounts is their tax efficiency. Because it is an individual account, the individual can manage the portfolio with an eye to reflect the individual’s tax status.

Access to Managerial Talent: One of the biggest drawing cards is access to some of the nation’s top money managers. And the performance of these managers is monitored continuously. One of the major problems with  mutual funds is that they have a high turnover of managers. As managers change they may change philosophies, incur style drift, and the mutual fund portfolio performance. This may impact the risk and reward characteristics of the mutual fund and more importantly upon the individual’s total portfolio risk and reward characteristics.

Control: Investors can make specific Portfolio requests, such as asking the manager to avoid holding certain stocks.

Ownership: Unlike mutual funds, in which assets are pooled, individuals own the securities they hold.

As baby boomers begin caring for their parents and grand parents they are facing complex and expensive health care costs with pharmaceuticals, hospitals, long term care, and physicians. PRESTIGE Advisors are foremost national experts of health care system and medical billing. Families face an alphabet soup of medical jargon and undecipherable medical bills. We assist the clients in obtaining the proper payments through our affiliate healthcare firm.

Fiduciary Investing for Trusts and Pension Plans and Selection of Investments for Retirement Plans

PRESTIGE Advisors believes that, in general, we serve as a fiduciary, and that we are particularly qualified to serve as advisor to investment fiduciaries for pension plans and trusts, including charitable trusts. PRESTIGE Advisors takes its fiduciary responsibility seriously and so each pension account is bonded. It believes that a bonded investment advisor is one of the necessary elements to provide a safe harbor for its ERISA fiduciary clients.

Fiduciaries of trusts and retirement plans must abide by the Prudent Investor Rule. From The Restatement of the Law Third, Trusts, Prudent Investor, Professor Edward C. Halbrach, Jr. summarizes the “Principles of Prudence”:

1. Sound diversification is fundamental to risk management and is ordinarily required of Trustees.

2. Risk and return are so directly related that Trustees have a duty to analyze and make decisions concerning  the levels of risk appropriate to the purposes, distribution requirements, and other circumstances of the trusts they administer.

3. Trustees have a duty to avoid fees, transaction costs, and other expenses that are not justified by the needs and realistic objectives of the trust’s investment program. 

4. The fiduciary duty of impartiality requires a balancing of the elements between production of current income and the protection of purchasing power.

5. Trustees may have a duty as well as having the authority to delegate, as prudent investors would.

As noted in the Uniform Prudent Investor Act (UPIA of 1994) in the prefatory:

• The standard of prudence is applied to any investment as part of the total portfolio, rather than to individual investments.  In the trust setting, the term portfolio embraces all the trust’s assets.

• The trade-off in all investing between risk and return is as the fiduciaries central consideration.

• All categorical restrictions on types of investments have been abrogated; the trustee can invest in anything that plays an appropriate role in achieving the risk/return objective of the trust and that meets the other requirements of prudent investing.

• The long familiar requirement that fiduciaries diversify their investments has been integrated into the definition of prudent investing.

• The much criticized former rule of trust law forbidding the trustee to delegate investment and management functions has been reversed. Delegation is permitted, subject to safeguards.

Business Plans and Appraisals for small businesses require professionals who are trained in business planning, taxes, investments, financial and estate planning.  PRESTIGE Advisors are especially prepared and available for your business plans and valuations. We are foremost experts on physician practice and other healthcare valuations and plans.