Fiduciary Financial Advisor in St. Augustine, FL

Most of what you saved went in before tax.

For years, part of every paycheck went into the 401(k) and never showed up on your tax return. Your spouse may have done the same. Some of it has since been rolled into IRAs. The balance is larger than you once expected, and it has done its job.

The tax on that money is still waiting. It comes due as the withdrawals come out. When they start, how large they are and which account they come from decide how much of the balance is left for you to spend.

Holland Capital builds that plan with you: when work stops, what you can spend, when Social Security begins and how the tax bill is spread across the years. Once the plan is written, we manage the investments to it.

The Years After the Last Paycheck

After the salary stops and before required minimum distributions begin, your taxable income may be lower than it has been in decades. Social Security may not have started yet, and nothing forces money out of the IRA.

That can create a window you did not have while you were working. You can convert part of the IRA to a Roth and pay the tax in a year when your rate is low. You can live partly on savings or a brokerage account while Social Security waits, which raises the check for the rest of your life. You can sell investments with gains while your income is low.

Required minimum distributions begin at 73, or 75 if you were born in 1960 or later. From then on, the size of the IRA determines part of your taxable income each year. That income can also affect what you pay for Medicare.

If you stop working before 65, you also need health coverage until Medicare starts. Help with the cost of a marketplace plan depends on your income, so a large Roth conversion in the same year can cost you some of that help. The plan weighs those trade-offs year by year. Our guide to Roth conversions explains the conversion itself, and our retirement planning page shows how the rest of the plan fits around it.

When a Parent’s Trust Names You Trustee

The trust was your parents’ plan. Now it is your job.

You are the successor trustee. There may be a brokerage account, a house and several beneficiaries, including your brothers and sisters. The attorney is handling the legal steps. The questions landing on you are about money: what the trust owns, how it should be invested, when distributions should be made and how to keep a clear record of what you did.

Florida holds a trustee to a prudent investor standard. The investments have to fit the trust’s purposes, terms and beneficiaries. What your parents owned for themselves may not be the portfolio that makes sense for a trust now serving several people.

Death also resets the tax picture. Assets held in a parent’s revocable trust generally take a new cost basis at death, equal to their value on that date. That can change the tax cost of selling what the trust inherited, so the date-of-death values need to be documented.

Taxes work differently for a trust. Once it can no longer be changed, it may file its own return, Form 1041. Whether income stays in the trust or is distributed can change who pays the tax, so the CPA needs to be part of the distribution plan.

You also have reporting duties to the beneficiaries. Clear records from the first day make that work much easier and give you a record of the investment and distribution decisions you made.

We work alongside the attorney and the CPA. We help inventory what the trust owns, write an investment policy for the trust, manage the portfolio and plan the financial side of distributions. The legal decisions stay with the attorney, and the CPA handles the tax return. Our guide to estate distribution planning covers how assets reach the beneficiaries.

A Written Policy for Each Portfolio

Your own accounts and a trust you manage have different jobs, so each gets its own investment policy statement.

For your accounts, the statement records what the retirement plan asks of the money, the risk the plan can carry and how each account is taxed. For a trust, it follows the trust document, the needs of the beneficiaries, the distributions it may make and the risk appropriate for those responsibilities.

Each portfolio is then managed to its statement, aiming for the best result after tax within the risk the plan allows. Which investments sit in the IRA, the Roth or the taxable account is part of that work, and our guide to asset location explains how the choice affects what you keep.

What you already own is where we begin. The tax cost of changing a holding is weighed before it is sold. Our investment management then carries the policy out.

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.

To begin, a recent statement for each account, your Social Security estimates and last year’s tax return are enough. If you are serving as a trustee, add the trust document and the account statements from the date of death.

We tell you what we see, what can stay as it is and what we would do first. Your CPA and your attorney keep their roles, and everyone works from the same figures, so the plan, the tax returns and the trust accounting agree.

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 offices are in Charlotte, North Carolina and Winter Park, Florida. We work with clients in St. Augustine primarily by video or phone. When an in-person meeting makes sense, we meet by appointment at the Regus center at 190 Registry Boulevard, near World Golf Village.

For clients whose investments we manage, accounts are held directly at Charles Schwab in the client’s own name. Holland Capital manages the investments but does not take custody of client assets. If a client ever needs in-person assistance from Schwab, the closest branch is in Jacksonville Beach at 2400 3rd Street South.

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

Our what we do page explains how a planning engagement works.

Frequently Asked Questions

Photo: Daniel Schwen / Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 4.0, cropped.