Financial Advisor in Naples, FL

You spent years accumulating things one decision at a time. You bought the house. Funded the accounts. Invested in a business or real estate. Helped the children. Gave money to causes you care about.

Eventually, the decisions stop being separate.

Selling an investment changes the tax return. Giving money to the children changes the estate. Keeping a house up north affects more than where you spend the summer. An IRA at one firm, a brokerage account somewhere else, and a trust managed by a third party may each look perfectly reasonable on its own, while nobody is looking at what they add up to.

The question is no longer whether each piece works. It is whether they work together.

When Estate Tax Becomes an Actual Number

For most families, estate tax is something that happens to other people. The federal exemption is $15 million per person in 2026, according to the IRS. With the right elections, a married couple can pass twice that before any federal estate tax is due. Above the line, the top rate is 40 percent.

If your balance sheet is approaching that line, decisions that once seemed ordinary start carrying estate consequences. The home, brokerage accounts, a share of a business, a building up north, life insurance, and whatever sits in a trust all count toward the same total. Gifts above $19,000 per person in a year use up part of your lifetime exemption.

That can change the question from “How much can I leave?” to “What should I do while I am still here?” You may want to help the children now. Pay tuition for grandchildren. Give appreciated investments to charity. Move future growth outside the estate. Or do none of those things until you know how much you are likely to need yourself.

The tools are well known: gifts during your lifetime, trusts that move future growth out of the estate, charitable gifts and charitable trusts, and life insurance owned so that its proceeds are not counted in the estate. Which ones belong depends on what you want the money to do. We work through those choices as part of estate and wealth transfer planning.

Florida has no estate or inheritance tax. A state where you own property may. Some states tax real estate located inside their borders even when the owner lives somewhere else, so the house up north can carry its own state estate tax.

We run the numbers on your estate as it stands today and as it may look in fifteen years if the investments keep growing. Your estate attorney drafts the documents. Your CPA files the returns. We make sure the plan they are working from reflects everything you own.

One Life, Two Addresses

You may spend the winter here and the summer in Michigan, Connecticut, or the mountains of North Carolina. There may be a doctor in each place, a bank in each place, and an adviser up north you have worked with for twenty years.

About four in ten housing units in the city of Naples are held for seasonal or occasional use, according to the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey.

Two homes are fine. Only one of them can be your domicile. Where you vote, where your cars are registered, where you file a declaration of domicile, where your doctors are, and where you spend your days all tell the story. If the other state has an income tax, those records are what it looks at.

Your money may be divided the same way. An IRA with the adviser up north. A brokerage account at a bank here. A trust account somewhere else. You do not necessarily need to move any of them. You do need someone looking across all of them.

Which account should pay for a new car, a large trip, or work on one of the houses? Selling from the wrong place can create a tax bill you did not need. Taking too much from an IRA can change the tax picture somewhere else. Holding cash in three different accounts because nobody sees the other two can leave more money sitting than you intended.

Two homes bring their own decisions. There are two sets of property taxes, insurance, and maintenance, plus the cost of moving between them. At some point, you may also have to decide whether you still want both. A home that was not your main residence does not receive the exclusion a primary home does when it is sold, so the gain can be taxable. That sale is part of capital gains tax planning.

You can keep the adviser, CPA, attorney, or other professionals you already trust. We build one plan around the decisions you are making, so the people you rely on in both places are working from the same numbers.

What Should You Spend, Give Away and Leave Alone?

Once you have more invested than you are likely to spend, not every dollar has the same job.

Some of the money has to support your life. Some may eventually go to children or grandchildren. Some may go to charity. And some assets may be worth keeping for the rest of your life rather than selling simply because they have gone up.

The money you expect to spend, give away, and leave behind may belong in different investments and different accounts.

Appreciated stock can be the best asset to give to charity, because the gift can avoid the capital gain. Investments you expect to leave to heirs may be better held than sold, because their cost basis resets at death. Traditional IRAs carry income tax for whoever inherits them, which can make them a good fit for charitable bequests.

The next question is where each investment belongs. A taxable account, traditional IRA, and Roth IRA do not treat income and gains the same way. Deciding what to own and which account should own it is the work of asset location.

Then there is the money spread among different firms. You may own the same companies several times without realizing it. You may have more cash than you intended. Or the accounts may each look diversified while the combined portfolio is making one large bet.

Before changing anything, we put the pieces together. What will you actually spend? What do you want to give away? What are you likely to leave behind? Which assets should be sold, and which may be better left alone?

Those decisions come first. The investment management follows them.

Working with Holland Capital

Holland Capital Management is an independent registered investment adviser and a fiduciary. M. Chad Holland, CFA, CFP® works directly with clients and is responsible for the planning and advice.

The first meeting is about the whole picture: what you own and where, how the year divides between your homes, what you have already set in motion for the family, and what is still undecided.

Retirement Engineering™, our planning process, was built for decisions that affect each other. It sets the order: what has to be decided this year, what depends on something else, and what can wait.

It often helps to bring your CPA or estate attorney into the conversation early. They keep their roles. We give them a plan to work from.

The first conversation is free. If there is work worth doing after that, we will define the scope and cost before you decide whether to move forward.

Our Florida office is in Winter Park. If you are looking for a financial advisor in Naples, we can work together without your adviser being down the street. Most meetings are by video or phone. When it makes sense to sit down together, we can meet by appointment at the Fifth Avenue Office Center, 780 Fifth Avenue South. Holland Capital does not maintain a branch office in Naples.

We work with clients throughout Florida. You can see the other Florida communities we serve here.

If you would like to read how engagements work before we talk, the what we do page covers it.

Frequently Asked Questions

Photo: Charles Patrick Ewing / Wikimedia Commons / CC BY 2.0, cropped.