Wealth Management for High-Net-Worth Families in Northern New Jersey
At a certain level of wealth, the binding constraint stops being investment returns and becomes taxes, structure, and what happens when the next generation inherits it.
Families with substantial assets rarely have an investment problem. They have a coordination problem.
There is an estate attorney who drafted documents some years ago. A CPA who files the returns. Possibly a trustee, a business, real estate in more than one state, and a set of accounts spread across custodians. Each professional does their piece well. No one is looking at the whole thing at once, and the gaps between them are where the money leaks out — a formula clause written for a $5 million exemption era that now overfunds a trust, a beneficiary designation that contradicts the will, a business interest with no succession terms, a state residency position nobody has stress-tested.
We are a tax-led wealth management practice. That is the organizing idea. Our Managing Partner, Debbie Taylor, CPA/PFS™, JD, CDFA®, is Chief Tax Strategist for Carson Wealth, the firm-wide role, and leads Carson Tax Solutions — the national tax planning program supporting advisors across the Carson network. The strategies we bring to your family are the ones she develops for the firm.
We work with families with $10 million or more in investable assets.
What we do that a generalist does not
We bring Carson’s Private Client team in behind us
Independent firms of our size generally cannot build a full complement of estate, trust, philanthropic, and business-exit specialists in-house. Most solve this by referring you out, which means the coordination problem you came in with becomes your problem again.
We solve it differently. Carson’s Private Client Services team was built specifically for families at $10 million and above, and it gives us roughly two dozen specialists to draw on: trust and estate planning professionals, business exit and succession specialists, Chartered Advisors in Philanthropy, and dedicated investment research for customized portfolios.
The distinction that matters: your team does not change. We remain the relationship, the point of contact, and the people who know your family. Private Client is depth we bring in behind us, not a desk you get transferred to.
And there is a reason we are well positioned to pull those levers. Our Managing Partner leads Carson Tax Solutions, the firm’s national tax planning program. When we bring in Private Client, we are not a local office filing a request with headquarters. We are a peer team, and the two programs were designed to work together.
We sit at the table with your CPA and attorney
Directly. On calls, in meetings, in writing. Coordination is not a courtesy we extend, it is the service.
We plan across generations, not just across your lifetime
The step-up in basis, the SECURE Act’s ten-year rule for inherited IRAs, and the difference between what is tax-efficient for you and what is tax-efficient for your children are frequently in tension. Optimizing only for the first generation can hand the second a much larger bill.
The planning agenda
These are the areas we work through with high-net-worth families. Not all of them apply to every family — the sequencing depends on your circumstances.
Estate and gifting strategy
- The federal estate and gift tax exemption is historically high and indexed annually for inflation. Exemption levels have moved substantially in both directions over the past decade, and the families who fare best are the ones who plan for the level to change rather than assuming it won’t.
- Annual exclusion gifting, which resets every year and does not carry forward — an unused year is simply gone. Paired with tuition and medical expenses paid directly to the institution or provider, which fall outside the annual exclusion and the lifetime exemption entirely, with no dollar limit. For families funding grandchildren’s education or a family member’s care, direct payment is often the most efficient transfer available and the most consistently overlooked.
- Advanced vehicles where appropriate: Spousal Lifetime Access Trusts (SLATs), Grantor Retained Annuity Trusts (GRATs), Qualified Personal Residence Trusts (QPRTs), and family LLCs. Which of these fits depends on your assets, your comfort with irrevocability, and the interest rate environment — GRATs in particular perform very differently depending on where rates sit.
- Formula clause review — see above. This is the single most common thing we find, and it is a direct consequence of exemption levels having risen faster than most documents were updated.
- Asset titling and beneficiary audit, so step-up planning and the estate documents actually agree. Beneficiary designations control regardless of what the will says, and they are rarely revisited after the account is opened.
New Jersey and multi-state exposure
New Jersey repealed its estate tax effective January 1, 2018. Many families in this area believe that ended the issue. It did not.
New Jersey’s inheritance tax remains in force, and it is assessed on the recipient, based on their relationship to the decedent, regardless of the estate’s size:
| Beneficiary Class | Who | Rate |
| Class A | Spouse or civil union partner, children, stepchildren, grandchildren, parents, grandparents | No tax |
| Class C | Siblings, son- or daughter-in-law | First $25,000 exempt; then graduated 11%–16% |
| Class D | Everyone else — nieces, nephews, cousins, friends, unmarried partners | 15%–16%, from essentially the first dollar |
(Rates per the New Jersey Division of Taxation, current as of 2026 and subject to change.)
If any part of your estate is destined for a sibling, a niece or nephew, an unmarried partner, or a friend, this is a live and often surprising cost, and there are planning approaches that address it.
We also work through domicile and residency for families with more than one home. Some examples include New Jersey to Florida moves, New York exposure for our Rockland and Orange County clients, and the coordination of residency rules, state income tax, and state estate tax across jurisdictions.
Multi-year income tax strategy
- Roth conversion sequencing, including for families already in the top bracket, where the case rests on protecting heirs from the ten-year inherited IRA rule rather than on the parents’ own arbitrage.
- RMD planning ahead of age 73, particularly after strong market years have pushed balances higher than the original plan assumed.
- Qualified charitable distributions — up to $111,000 per person in 2026 for those 70½ or older, including the once-in-a-lifetime split-interest entity QCD of $55,000. Coupling a QCD with a conversion in the same year is a combination we use often.
- Charitable strategy under OBBBA’s revised rules, including the 0.5% AGI floor for itemizers and the new below-the-line deduction for non-itemizers.
- Deduction timing, the expanded SALT cap, and multi-year modeling of when to accelerate or defer.
- The widow’s penalty, planned for while both spouses are living.
Business owners and concentrated wealth
- Qualified Small Business Stock (QSBS) — the expanded exclusion of up to $15 million with tiered benefits at three, four, and five years, applicable to companies up to $75 million in assets.
- Qualified business income (QBI) deduction of up to 20% for pass-through entities.
- Entity structure review — S corporation, partnership, or C corporation — under current law.
- 100% bonus depreciation on qualifying assets, coordinated against Section 179 and MACRS.
- Defined benefit and cash balance plans for owners with consistently high income.
- Concentrated position and liquidity event planning, before the event rather than after.
The next generation
- Education and dependent strategy — five-year front-loading of 529 plans, funding up to $500,000 in some states, the expanded definition of qualified expenses now including tutoring, curriculum materials, and standardized testing, and the $35,000 lifetime 529-to-Roth rollover.
- Trump Accounts for families interested in ultra-early retirement account compounding for children under 18.
- Multigenerational Roth strategy, sized to what your children’s brackets are likely to be when they inherit.
- Family conversations. We meet with adult children (often before there is anything to inherit) so that the second generation is not meeting their parents’ advisor for the first time at the worst possible moment.
How we work
A dedicated team, not a single point of contact. Wealth advisors, a wealth strategist, planners, and client service managers who know your file.
A structured annual planning calendar. Every household on an ongoing, scheduled cadence of planning work through the year, not one review meeting and a newsletter.
Proactive, not responsive. If legislation changes something that affects you, you hear it from us first.
Is this the right fit?
We are likely a good fit if you:
- Have $10 million or more in investable assets
- Have significant wealth in tax-deferred accounts, a business, or a concentrated position
- Have estate documents that have not been reviewed against current exemption levels
- Have property or family in more than one state
- Care about what your children and grandchildren inherit and how prepared they are to receive it
- Want your advisor, CPA, and attorney in the same conversation
We are likely not the right fit if you are looking for a purely transactional investment relationship or for someone to execute trades on request.
Frequently Asked Questions
Do you replace my estate attorney or my CPA?
No. We coordinate with them. Most of our clients keep the professionals they already have, and we would rather join that team than reconstitute it.
Do you provide legal or tax advice?
We provide tax planning and financial strategy. We do not prepare returns or draft legal documents, and we do not provide legal advice.
Will you work with our children?
Yes, and we encourage it. Multigenerational planning works considerably better when the second generation has a relationship with the team before they need one.
Where do you work?
From Franklin Lakes, serving Bergen, Passaic, Morris, and Essex Counties in New Jersey and Rockland and Orange Counties in New York, with clients in more than 20 states.
A conversation about the whole picture.
Bring the estate documents and last year’s return. We will tell you what we see — including if we think you are already well served.