Legacy Planning
Built to Carry Forward
Your legacy is more than what you leave behind. It is the clarity and confidence you give the people you love.
We help bring your assets, beneficiaries, tax strategy, healthcare wishes, and estate documents into one coordinated plan. By working alongside your attorney and other trusted professionals, we help make sure your intentions are understood, your values are preserved, and your family knows how to carry your vision forward.
Families reported losing their wealth by the second and third generations, respectively, in a Williams Group study.
Legacy readiness
Do your documents and decisions still reflect your intentions?
Five questions worth asking
Are all your accounts correctly titled?
Are your beneficiaries properly structured?
Are tax considerations addressed?
Are your legal documents up to date and do they account for every aspect of your life?
Are your healthcare directives clearly defined and in place?
The plan only works if the people responsible for it can understand it.
Clarity is part of the legacy.
Your planning map
Making the complex understandable
Integrative Planning analyzes the existing estate plan and turns it into a few easy-to-understand pages.
The planning map identifies the people involved, including planners, attorneys, executors, trustees, powers of attorney, and physicians.
Roles, timing, and safeguards are organized so the family and outside professionals can understand the plan.
As personal CFO, Integrative Planning coordinates the planning conversation; legal drafting and legal advice remain with the client's attorney.
Revisited as life changes
Tax law · Family structure · Investment mix · Charitable goals · Healthcare needs · Estate rules
A Tale Of Two Fortunes
“At a 1973 family reunion, 120 Vanderbilt descendants gathered and not one of them was a millionaire.”
“More than 170 Rockefeller heirs now share in a family fortune Forbes estimates at $8.4 billion.”
The Vanderbilts
In 1810, an eleven-year-old named Cornelius Vanderbilt borrowed $100 from his mother to start a ferry service in New York harbor. By the time he died in 1877, he had built that loan into a railroad and shipping empire worth more than $100 million, making him the richest man in America. His son, William Henry Vanderbilt, doubled the fortune within a decade and briefly became the wealthiest man in the country himself.
What the family never built was a plan to keep it. There was no trust, no family governance, no shared discipline passed down alongside the money. Heirs spent freely on mansions, yachts, and the lavish parties that came to define the Gilded Age, while the railroads that generated the wealth went increasingly unmanaged by a generation better at spending fortunes than building them.
Within thirty years of Cornelius’s death, no Vanderbilt ranked among the wealthiest Americans. Within fifty years, the fortune was effectively gone. At a 1973 family reunion, 120 Vanderbilt descendants gathered and not one of them was a millionaire.
Gloria Vanderbilt, Cornelius’s great-great-granddaughter, died in 2019 with an estate of roughly $1.5 million, most of which passed to her son, journalist Anderson Cooper, who has said he has no intention of leaving a fortune to his own child.
The Rockefellers
John D. Rockefeller founded Standard Oil in 1870 and built it into a fortune historians estimate at more than $900 million, largest personal fortune in American history.
Unlike Vanderbilt, Rockefeller treated preserving the wealth as seriously as creating it. Starting in 1934 and formalized in 1952, the family established irrevocable trusts that no single heir could unilaterally spend down, funded in part by life insurance on each generation and overseen by professional money managers.
The family built what became Rockefeller Financial Services, with dedicated teams managing investments, business interests, risk, and philanthropy. A family constitution and shared institutions and Rockefeller Center, Rockefeller University, the Rockefeller Foundation, gave descendants a structure to remain engaged stewards rather than passive spenders.
More than 170 Rockefeller heirs now share in a family fortune Forbes estimates at $8.4 billion. The best-known recent steward, David Rockefeller, died in 2017 at age 101 as the world’s oldest billionaire, worth $3.3 billion; his son, David Rockefeller Jr., now chairs the family’s philanthropic efforts.
Moral of the story, things tend to go better with planning.
Legacy Planning Questions, Answered Plainly
Integrative Planning helps organize and coordinate account titling, beneficiaries, tax considerations, existing legal documents, healthcare directives, and the roles around the plan. An estate attorney is responsible for legal advice and legal drafting.
Beyond the spreadsheet
A plan should outlive the planner.
Legacy connects what you built, whom you love, and what you want your resources to keep doing.
Does your plan still reflect your intentions?
Start a planning conversation about the people, decisions, and professionals that need to work together.