Frequently asked questions

We're an independent, fiduciary investment advisory firm, and we act as the single point of contact for your entire financial life. We don't just manage your investments. We manage and coordinate everything around it:

• Investment Management - public markets, private markets and alternatives, and custom portfolios built around your actual situation, not a model pulled off a shelf.
• Financial and Retirement Planning - goals-based planning, retirement income, Social Security timing, and Required Minimum Distribution (RMD) strategy.
• Tax Aware Investment Planning - active tax minimization strategies and coordinated with your CPA, so your investment decisions and your tax picture actually talk to each other.
• Trust & Estate Planning Coordination - strategies to accomplish a wide variety of tax, gift, legacy, and charitable goals and coordinated with your attorney's document execution from basic documents to Trusts, LPs, LLCs, and multigenerational structures, all integrated with your investments.
• Lending, Mortgages and Liability Management - mortgages, lines of credit, margin, and custom lending against concentrated stock or other assets, arranged through our global custody bank - the Bank of New York (BNY). We treat the debt side of your balance sheet as seriously as the asset side.
• Private Banking, Cash Management, Currencies - institutional and multi-currency cash management, checking and bill pay, and zero to low cost domestic and international wires, through BNY.
• Complexity Coordination - oversight, modeling, and consolidated reporting on assets and liabilities and accounts held at other institutions, on real estate and business interests, on stock options and RSU, on insurance, and oversight and/or coordination with the outside advisors who touch all of it.

Everyone and anyone looking for a "non-corporatized" and therefore more personal human connection and experience in those they invite into the financial and related aspects of your life.

For over 25 years, we have served individuals and families from creative professions and industries, entrepreneurs/founders, scientists and academics, capital markets professionals, and increasingly early career Gen Z professionals, entrepreneurs, and creators.

Bottom-line - we strive to serve anyone who values and respects our people-centered approach to navigating the fast-moving and often over-hyped world of financial advice, too often characterized by "slick" sales approaches and "hot" product offerings.

At many Wall Street wealth management firms, national banks, and institutionally funded "independent" wealth management firms, advisors typically work within institutional profit driven structures deployed through financial "rewards and punishments" and other constraints - product cross-selling, minimum account size hurdles, revenue production incentives, and no fiduciary standard structured into the business model. Even claims of a "boutique" approach within these institutions is subject to these same constraints and reward/punishment approach to directing advisors' focus and activities.

We don't have any of that. No products to push, no minimum revenue targets, no conflict between what's good for us and what's good for you. We are completely agnostic as to what investments you hold, where you hold your assets, how you change your decisions over time. As registered investment advisors, not broker-dealers, not "hybrid" RIA/Broker-Dealers, we act as fiduciaries which means we don't advise with an eye toward what's good for us - which changes everything.

At our firm, there is no getting "charmed" in, and then being handed off to a junior person to work with - a common model of large teams and firms. You work directly with all of us including the firm principals, and you can contact any of us anytime. Every client of our firm is equally important to us and we provide the same level of service. We do not discriminate our time and service based on asset or revenue size. We work as a unified team, though your primary contact is your choice - whoever you feel best understands your situation and you are comfortable and enjoy communicating with. Practically, we all work with all of our clients, so you are getting the whole firm and team as your advisors.

For this reason we're intentionally selective about who we take on - we want to make sure we can give every client the attention they deserve.

Financial Planning has been an integrated part of wealth management for many years and typically is simply part of our advisory relationship rather than a separate engagement with its own fee. For most of our clients the two are inseparable. The portfolio only makes sense in the context of the tax picture, the estate documents, the concentrated position, the business, the next liquidity event. Splitting them into two conversations tends to produce advice that's technically fine and practically useless.

That said, plenty of people come to us wanting a second opinion on a plan, not a new place to hold their assets. In those cases, our advisory relationship is planning focused and not integrated with investment management. That's a conversation we're glad to have. If you want someone to look at what you've built and tell you honestly where the gaps are, start there and we'll figure out together whether a full relationship makes sense.

Yes. While we have physical offices in New York (SoHo and One World Trade Center), Miami (Wynwood), Los Angeles (Beverly Hills), and Boston (Harvard Square), practically speaking most of our client relationships are managed through a combination of in-person meetings wherever our clients want to meet, often in their homes, and through video calls. We have clients across the country, and clients with multi-country residences and tax regimes.

Whatever suits you best. Reach out through our Contact Page on our website www.dtwn.co or email us directly at info@dtwn.co and we'll set up an introductory call - no pitch, no presentation, just a real conversation about your situation and whether we're the right fit. There's no commitment involved.

However you would like.

Choose between an asset-based fee (the most common that clients choose), a flat planning/investment/consulting fee, a project-based fee, or some hybrid customized approach that you design yourself.

There's a lot of confusing and often shallow and mediocre advice circulating about this issue in the media sphere, even in high reputation media. The bottom-line for us is that we want you to choose the fee approach that fits you and that you are most comfortable with. We want to make this issue a non-issue. As an FYI - we don't earn commissions, referral fees, or compensation from third parties of any kind.

You can count on this: we will discuss the fee issue straight-forwardly, providing you with all the information that you need, and from multiple perspectives, to help you make an informed decision that best fits you. We will share with you our perspective on the pros and cons of each approach.

No, not really. Rather a focus on if we are the right fit for you and vice versa. If you think we're right for you, generally we want to work with you.

While we do serve clients with significant assets, we really are focused on fit rather than on assessing your fit for us as a number. That's too "corporate" for us. If you're early in your life and wealth building phase and you feel we're a good match for you, we'd rather have that conversation with you than decide via an arbitrary threshold.

We start with your life goals and financial situation broadly - your goals, your time horizon, your tax picture, your income needs, your liquidity needs for short term purchases, what you already own elsewhere, sensitivity and comfort to market declines, and a lot more. We start with questions, not with answers.

From there we build. We have access to, and deep experience with, nearly the entire universe of investment choices. Access is no longer an investment issue for investors. Rather, thoroughly understanding the investments themselves, especially the newly emerging investment innovations, is key. We do not blindly "follow the hot dot" of the moment. Depending on what your situation calls for, that can mean low-cost ETFs, broad or targeted indexes, individual equities, bonds and other fixed income, cash management, options, high income strategies, commodities, real estate and other special assets, private markets and other alternatives.

What we won't do is decide what you should invest in before we deeply understand why you're investing, and how we should approach that individually for you.

For more information see our Growing Your Wealth brochure.

Yes. For qualified clients we provide access to and advise on a very broad and deep range of alternative investments through our investment platform partnerships with Goldman Sachs, iCapital, and CAIS, as well as directly through private managers - including emerging technology companies, structured product securities, private equity, hedge funds, private real estate funds, infrastructure, co-investment opportunities, sports and entertainment franchises, art related investments, cryptocurrencies, and other special investments.

Importantly, we help advise you through due diligence, expected return, special tax and liquidity issues that are key parts of the experience with alternative investments.

For more information, see Growing Your Wealth.

We think about taxes in every investment decision, not just at year-end. This includes tax-loss harvesting, asset location across account types, managing wash sales, and coordinating with your CPA on timing of gains and distributions. For clients with concentrated positions, we can help with strategies to diversify without triggering an unnecessary tax event.

Yes. We work with executives, finance professionals, and founders who have a significant portion of their net worth tied up in equity and equity related deferred compensation. We can help model vesting schedules, develop a tax-efficient diversification strategy, design 10b5-1 plans, advise on monetization and hedging strategies, and coordinate with legal and tax advisors around liquidity events.

Formally, clients generally decide on semi-annually or annually, though some prefer even more frequently. We do at least annual formal reviews, but we're available whenever you need and want to talk to us, and especially when something changes - a new job, a liquidity event, a major purchase, a market event you have questions about. Most of our clients call us regularly. If something is happening in your life or the markets, we want to be in the conversation.

We do not draft estate documents - that's the role of an estate attorney - and we can help you with that if you don't have one. We do have a lot of experience with T&E strategy, planning, and implementation with many complex client situations so we can be helpful to you alongside your T&E attorneys. We coordinate very closely with your attorney to make sure your investment strategy and accounts, beneficiary designations, and financial structure are aligned with your estate plan. For clients who don't have an estate attorney yet, we can make introductions and help get the process started.

Yes, proactively. Coordination with your tax advisor is critical. We proactively share information with your CPA - realized gains, loss harvesting activity, alternative investment K-1s, and anything else that affects your tax picture.

Yes. A business sale is a tax event, a legal event, a family event, a financial event, and an investment event all at once - and the decisions made before and after the close matter. We coordinate with your M&A attorney, CPA, and estate attorney while providing the relevant financial and investment analysis to support your decisions.

Yes - for both individuals and business owners. For individuals, this means building a retirement income strategy across all account types (IRA, 401k, Roth, and taxable accounts). We further strategize tax minimization approaches caused by RMDs and social security. For your goal of funding living expenses in retirement, we model and advise on withdrawal rates, withdrawal sequencing, and withdrawal sequence of return risks. For business owners, we can also help structure and manage SEP IRAs, solo 401ks, and cash balance plans.

Your assets are held at one of the largest and safest financial institutions in the world - BNY, headquartered in Manhattan. We do not directly hold our clients' assets and funds.

You always maintain direct ownership of your assets, and your accounting, books and records, your tax statements, and your monthly account statements are provided directly to you by BNY.

BNY is a GSIB (Globally Systemic Important Bank) and one of the world's largest banks. Bank of New York (or BNY), founded by Alexander Hamilton in 1784, is America's oldest bank, and currently custodies and/or supervises over $59 trillion in assets. You always maintain direct ownership of your assets, and your accounting and books and records, your tax statements, and your monthly account statements are provided directly to you by BNY.

Because your assets are held at BNY and not at Downtown Wealth Studios, they're not affected by anything that happens to our firm. BNY is a SIPC member (Securities Investor Protection Corporation) and maintains additional private insurance coverage well above SIPC limits. Your assets are yours and held segregated from the assets of BNY. We at Downtown simply provide advisory services to you in partnership with BNY as our and your custodian bank.

Yes. You have direct online access to your accounts 24/7 through your online client portal. You can view your account balances, investment positions, transaction history, and statements there. We also provide consolidated reporting and are happy to walk through your portfolio picture at any time.

A fiduciary is legally required to act in your best interest - not just recommend something "suitable." As an SEC Registered Investment Adviser firm (RIA), we are held to a fiduciary standard at all times. Broker-dealers, by contrast, are not held to a fiduciary standard.

No. We are "fee-only," which means that our only compensation comes from a fee for the advisory services we provide. This places us in a position to be fully objective and agnostic as to decisions toward your asset allocation, investment security and product decisions, and your decisions to buy or sell securities at any time. We do not receive commissions from product sales, referral fees from third parties, or any form of compensation that could create a conflict with your interests. The fee-only approach is straight-forward, transparent, and easy to understand.

Our Form ADV (Parts 1 and 2) and Form CRS are available in the footer of each website page. You can also find these disclosures directly on the SEC's public website at adviserinfo.sec.gov.

The minute you decide to work with us you are a client and will be receiving our advice and services. You formally become a client when all of the account opening and advisory forms are signed, which can be in a day. The "onboarding" process can take anywhere from one day to two or three weeks depending on if and from where you are transferring in your investments and assets to BNY. Typically, one to two weeks and all of your assets are onboarded with us. It's a process we manage for you.

We handle the transition. Once you decide to move, we initiate the account transfer process through BNY - most assets transfer in kind (meaning they don't need to be sold), which avoids unnecessary tax events. We coordinate with your previous custodian to make the process as smooth as possible. You don't need to be involved in the logistics.

That's exactly what we'd recommend. Our first conversations are always exploratory - no pitch, no presentation, no pressure. We want to understand your situation and make sure that we are actually the right fit before either of us commits to anything.