Heath Goldman - Don’t Build Your Financial House Without an Architect (I2017)

It's true that some things change as we get older, but if you're a woman over 40 and you're dealing with insomnia, brain fog, moodiness, and weight gain, you don't have to accept it as just another part of aging. And with Miti Health, you can get help and stop pushing through it alone. The experts at Mitty understand that all these symptoms can be connected to the hormonal changes that happen around menopause, and Mitie can help you feel more like yourself again. Many healthcare providers aren't trained to treat or even recognize menopause symptoms. MIDI clinicians are menopause experts. They're dedicated to providing safe, effective, FDA approved solutions for dozens of hormonal symptoms, not just hot flashes. Most Importantly, they're covered by insurance. 91% of MIDI patients get relief from symptoms within just two months. You deserve to feel great. Book your virtual visit today at joinmidi.com. That's join MIDI.com. Welcome to the Exit Coach Radio show, the show for baby boomer business owners who are looking for cutting edge information as they plan their 3 to 10 year business succession and exit. Every week we interview top professional advisors for. The best tips, strategies, and precautions so you can be well planned. And don't miss our one minute exit coach tip of the day on exit coachradio.com. And now here's your host, the exit coach, Bill Black. My next guest is Heath Goldman. He's a financial architect with Icon Wealth and Legacy Partners in Sherman Oaks, California. Heath, welcome to the show. Bill, thank you for having me. Heath, we talked a little bit on the phone about some, um, interesting and fascinating ideas for our listeners, but before we jump into that, one of the things we like to do is get an idea of your background and, um, how you, uh, started in your profession. So how'd you get started? Well, that's an interesting story. I actually came out here to go to law school, and I'm from Phoenix, Arizona and went to school at the University of Arizona in Tucson and came out here and was in somewhat culture shock with the cost of living and the difference between LA and Tucson, and I actually, after my first year of law school, took a job at Smith Barney, just cold calling for some guys there planning on going back to school, and, uh, it did impress one of the gentlemen I was working for and uh became a junior partner with him and Like I say, the rest is history, so I did manage money for a number of years. That's not the bulk of my practice any longer and over the years have transitioned pretty much into a fee-based financial planning practice. So tell us about Icon Wealth and Legacy Partners. How did that get started? There was a partner that I started that with a number of years ago, ended up buying him out, and is now my firm. And uh we act, as you mentioned, as financial architects, which is a term that many of your listeners probably haven't heard about, um, but, uh, we utilize uh a real estate analogy. To explain kind of who we are and what we do and just as you would hire the architect to design the blueprints and the plans for your home, skyscraper, apartment complex, whatever it may be, we are hired for a fee by our clients to design and construct multi-generational and multi-disciplined road maps to to success, as we like to say. When you say construct them, you're talking about putting together a whole group of strategies that they can employ that across multiple disciplines and getting the team involved. Is that really what you're getting at there? Yeah, absolutely. So once the plan has been designed by us as the architect, uh, we do kind of oversee that role of Once again, the real estate analogy, the general contractor, and then we will uh typically work with the clients current group of advisors that they're currently working with. So we're not looking to replace anybody on. The team currently we are looking to have a roadmap that everybody collectively and collaboratively are going to utilize to benefit the goals and objectives of the client. That's a great analogy because people wouldn't think about building a home or a construction project without having a blueprint, and yet they launch into a lot of things financially without much thought about where it's heading and how it. How it, uh, collaborates with everything else. So, do you collaborate with a lot of other types of advisors and CPAs and attorneys and others? Yeah, I mean, I think the primary groups that we focus on without, uh, breaking those topics down would be, uh, state planning attorneys, business attorneys, CPAs, insurance agents, and investment advisors. Great. Well, every, every, uh, team needs a coach. So when, uh, what types of companies or businesses or individuals, uh, what's your sweet spot? Who do you work with generally? My sweet spot really focuses on the closely held business owner, uh, matriarch or patriarch, um, could have a, a 2nd or 3rd generation in the business, um, but it is a, you know, a closely held business and also real estate professionals, so clients who, um, are developers, clients who have accumulated apartment buildings. Uh, multi-family units over the years, uh, through the cash, oftentimes that there's businesses have generated in excess of what they need, and, uh, That's that's really the sweet spot and You know, ages is not really that important to me as much as it used to be when I first got into this business because there are a number of people in the 30, 40, 50 year old demographics that have substantial wealth. And when I was taught in this business many years ago, it's, you know, you're looking for that transitional generation that's 65, 70, 75 generation age ages and it's not really the important part of my practice any longer in terms of. Specific ages. Well, and a lot of those assets you're talking about like real estate and businesses are great. They can throw off cash flow, but they're also creating a potential tax situation when people go to sell them or if they, you know, pass away and there's an estate tax need. What are some of the ways that people are dealing with the high taxes on the sales of securities and businesses these days? You know, it's a great question. You know, there's really 3 main areas that we focus on with our clients, obviously ordinary income tax planning. Capital gain planning on the sale of an asset and then obviously a state tax planning as you referenced. I think one of the strategies that is going to become more in vogue in 2014 is a strategy known as the charitable remainder Trust. I don't want your listeners to hear the word charitable remainder trust and think, OK, that's only meant for people who are charitably inclined, and that really doesn't apply to me and my family because, um, the charitable remainder trust, if you look at it in and of itself, oftentimes can derive substantially. Larger benefits for the clients and their family as then would have happened had they sold the asset outright. Well, it, you know, there's a lot of strategies that people should take a look at and put on their long list of things to look at. What are some of the benefits for people that they would find by using such a strategy? I've looked at the math and the benefits with a wealth replacement vehicle, which is another strategy that's employed, the benefits are almost 2 to 1 cumulative benefits during life income versus assets passed to future generations. There is zero capital gains tax paid. And this is legal. It's already part of the IRS code section for over 40 years. And also there is a benefit for the charity of their choice or charities of their choice, whether it be their own family foundation or specific charities that they may want to partner with. So potentially saving taxes, #1. #2, they're helping out potentially, um, charities that they, um, things that are dear to their heart and they're getting income and so not all bad, it's something to take a look at and again nothing's for everyone. Um, what other strategies are people looking at these days? I think that you are going to see the affluent clients start to take a lot, take a deeper look at additional income tax strategies. You know, oftentimes we get the phone call, you know, January, February, March from our CPA, and we're told that it's going to cost X and X is need to be paid by April 15th or whatever that may be. And I think now with the higher brackets. And the extra Medicare surtax and some of these other add-ons that people are going to be looking at their tax situations much closer, and there is a strategy known as the lead Trust, which is another way for people to reduce their income taxes, but it's also a way to create a long lasting legacy for them and their family with the benefit of some type of charitable planning. Great. OK, so you're giving us some good ideas. We're talking with Heath Goldman of Icon Wealth and Legacy Partners. We're gonna take a short break and when we come back, we're gonna ask Heath to share a few stories and tips and ideas and precautions that you can use. We'll be right back after this. If you came back from lunch today and there was a resignation letter on your desk, which employee would you really, really not want it to be from? More importantly, what are you doing to prevent the situation from happening in the first place? We work with business owners like you every day to design plans that attract, motivate, retain, and reward key employees. Don't wait until it's too late. Contact Bill Black, the exit coach at 866-370-3774 for a free consultation on how to retain and reward your key employees. That's 866-370-3774. Call today. Whether you run a medium sized business or a major corporation, Harry B. Alexson offers you personalized skilled legal services in several key areas of banking and finance services, mergers and acquisitions, syndications in private equity and commercial real estate law. With more than 20 years' experience, Harry B. Alexson provides you with a large firm partner and resources with boutique firm service and attention. To learn more, simply call Harry B. Alexson at 714-384-6578. Welcome back friends. Just a reminder that to hear highlights of this interview and to listen to all the interviews and highlights of our many past guests, please visit us online at exaoachradio.com, where we upload new content every day. I'm talking with Heath Goldman of Icon. And legacy partners and he, um, before the break we were talking about a couple different strategies. Let's change gears a little bit right now. Um, can you tell us, um, give us an example of a recent client you helped? What was your situation before you came on the scene and how did you help, um, and what was the outcome of that? Ah, yeah, I would love to share a story. I just trying to pick a, pick a good one. recently, I was able to work with a prominent neurosurgeon here in Los Angeles. And they, uh, the client does have their own foundation and I am a kind of a quasi executive director of the foundation as well, but they are fabulous at what they do, which is typically uh back surgeries. But all of the other financial aspects of their life while being dealt with were not being dealt with as well as they needed to be or could be from this client's perspective. So I was brought on to the team to get my full understanding of what their financial situation is, wills and trusts and durable powers of attorney, advanced health care directives, disability insurance, medical malpractice, home, auto, everything that this client touched financially. And through conversations and discussions and conversations and more discussions and everything else, we were starting to put together a game plan for children's college education and their savings and their future retirement and, and so on and so forth and They just did not have time to deal with all of the great members of their team that they currently had. They needed somebody like myself who could have those conversations with those other advisors, understood the language, and was able to put that stuff in place while this client performed back surgeries, performed them very well, and the rewarding part, I think for me was looking at them wanting to give back something and helping. Uh, the community through their own foundation. So in that kind of a situation, they really needed an architect after the fact, right, someone to come in and make the team work well together and bring everybody together to, for the benefit of the client. Sounds like. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, as I mentioned before, most of my clients have fabulous advisors that they work with. What they don't have is an understanding of what each and every one of these advisors do and also the time. They are busy. Making widgets or putting their firefighter's hat on each day when they come to the office and focusing on what the business needs to needs to do and not all of these other ancillary pieces, although they are very important ancillary pieces and they know that it's not their area of expertise. So most people. Think of me as an added expense, and once we are able to put together a competitive proposal for them, they realize that we are going to save them time, energy, and most importantly, money by utilizing our services as opposed to adding another expense to the bottom line. And how do you save people money in that regard? Because a lot of people that I talked to say, well, you're just, you're another person, you're actually going to be another expense, but explain to us how how using you in the first place saves people money in the long run. Couple of different examples. One is some of the income tax strategies that we were talking about before. Clients may know about them, may know they need to implement them, but if they don't have the time or the expertise to get them implemented with our input and being part of the of the financial team, we are able to get those strategies implemented without the client having to take a tremendous amount of time and energy to implement them, thereby saving the client, the money. And additionally, a funny story, recently I was sitting down with a property and cau the insurance agent that I had brought into a client situation, and we were going through the competitive proposal, and the client and the agent said to the client, Well, you know, you have 4 cars on your policy an XYZ, BMW, XYZ, Mercedes, and the client looked at the agent and said, I haven't owned either one of those cars for over a year. Oh well, whether he forgot to call the previous agent, whether he Did whether he, the agent, dropped the ball, you know, we, we couldn't figure out what had happened, but we did know that the client had paid for two cars for the last year on their, on their automobile policy that they did not own. We were able to take those cars off for obvious reasons and thereby was a substantial tax savings to. Savings to the client. So by the big picture planning, looking at the overall thing, you can sometimes you can see situations that are wasteful or maybe ah help people before they get into a real expensive situation to realize maybe they, they don't want a particular situation as an example, right? Absolutely. Now, uh, if I were to ask you for some tips, ideas, or precaution, precaution, precautions for our listeners. Uh, what would you tell me? Maybe give me a couple of tips, ideas, or precautions that you would tell someone when they're starting their planning process. Well, I think the first thing I would tell everybody is to understand what the different components of your planning process are. And when you start to look at all of the different elements, asset protection and trusts and taxes and tax returns and employee benefits and all of this stuff, it becomes overwhelming. And get your arms around all of the different moving pieces or hire somebody to get their arms around all of the moving pieces and understand exactly how all of these pieces interrelate because if one doesn't work properly, it could be detrimental to you and your family's financial success. Great tip. You got anything else for us? Understand asset protection, and I'm not talking about complicated asset protection. I'm talking about just the basics umbrella policy if nothing else. Somebody comes over to your house and you're having wine with dinner and somebody slips and falls, you know, what is your liability? Do you have liability? Are you protected? Uh, just the basics and what I have seen with many of my clients and affluent clients is, you know, primarily who we work with, um, it's not always, uh, they're not always protected. Yeah, so don't build it up if you don't have it protected. I mean, it doesn't make a lot of sense. That's absolutely true. He, uh, how do, uh, our listeners find you and are there any, uh, what, what do they find when they get there, for instance? Uh, 3 ways to access me. You can access us through our website, which is www.iconwl that stands for wealth and Legacy Partners.com, so iconWLP.com. Heath G at iconWLP.com, or 818-981-7184, which is my direct office line. And if you take a look at the website, there is a lot of information there, great articles, start to educate yourself on some of the other things and areas and issues that you should be addressing potentially in your life and uh just additional resources. Great tips. Thanks very much for joining us today, Heath. It's been a real pleasure. Hope you'll come back and join us again soon. Thanks for having me. I've been talking with Heath Goldman of Icon Wealth and Legacy Partners in Sherman Oaks, California. We're going to take a short break and when we come back, we'll have another guest, Marlow Van Oshot from Los Angeles. What can you do in a minute? At Exitoachradio.com, you can listen to a daily tip, idea, or precaution from over 100 top advisors about how to prepare your business for the future. We upload new one minute tips at 6 a.m. and 10 p.m. daily. Exitcoachradio.com. Come listen for a minute. Thank you for listening to Exit Coach Radio. It's true that some things change as we get older, but if you're a woman over 40 and you're dealing with insomnia, brain fog, moodiness, and weight gain, you don't have to accept it as just another part of aging. And with Miti Health, you can get help and stop pushing through it alone. The experts at Mitty understand that all these symptoms can be connected to the hormonal changes that happen around menopause, and Mittie can help you feel more like yourself again. Many healthcare providers aren't trained to treat or even recognize menopause symptoms. MIDI clinicians are menopause experts. They're dedicated to providing safe, effective, FDA approved solutions for dozens of hormonal symptoms, not just hot flashes. Most Importantly, they're covered by insurance. 91% of MIDI patients get relief from symptoms within just two months. You deserve to feel great. Book your virtual visit today at joinmidi.com. That's join MIDI.com.