Five Scenarios.
One Standard
of Advice.

A 38-year-old senior lawyer earning $280,000 per annum came to us with the familiar problem of a high income but no real architecture beneath it. He and his wife had two young children, a growing investment property, and no family trust. Their KiwiSaver accounts were in default balanced funds. He had income protection insurance that had never been reviewed since he took it out at 27. No estate documents, no enduring powers of attorney.

The challenge was not a lack of wealth — it was a lack of structure to receive it. At his income and trajectory, every year without a trust and without optimised KiwiSaver positioning was compounding in the wrong direction.

A 54-year-old had spent 22 years building a construction company to a point where an offer came in at $3.85 million. He came to us four months before settlement — enough time to act, but not enough time to be careless. The family trust that held his shares was established in 2002 with a deed that had never been updated. His FIF exposure through a small offshore fund holding had never been managed correctly. He had no investment portfolio outside the business.

The risk was familiar: proceeds from a business sale are often the single largest capital event in a person's life, yet most business owners reach settlement without a plan for what happens the day after. Tax, structure, and investment all needed to be resolved before — not after — the money arrived.

A retired couple, both 66, had $2.2 million spread across three separate investment providers — the result of accumulating assets over 40 years with no single coordinating adviser. Each provider had recommended their own products. One held the bulk in a conservative fund inappropriate for a 20-year retirement horizon. Their estate documents were 15 years old. They had no drawdown plan — they were simply pulling money from whichever account felt convenient.

Retirement is not the end of wealth management — it is the beginning of its most technically demanding phase. Without a drawdown sequencing strategy, even a well-built portfolio can be eroded by poor tax outcomes and poor timing.

A $4.5 million charitable foundation approached us after its board recognised that the investment function had no real governance framework. The portfolio had been managed informally by a single trustee who had since retired. There was no investment policy statement, no defined spending rate, no benchmark against which performance could be assessed, and no reporting format that the board could use to fulfil its fiduciary obligations.

Charitable foundations face the same investment complexity as private families — but with the additional dimension of perpetual time horizon, governance accountability, and the legal obligation to act in the interests of the charitable purpose. Informal management is not compatible with those duties.

A family trust established in 1994 held $6.1 million across investment property, a managed share portfolio, and a rural land block. The original settlor was now 81. His three adult children were listed as discretionary beneficiaries; his grandchildren were not. The trust deed had never been updated to reflect the 2006 Trustee Act amendments. There was no family investment charter, no agreed distribution policy, and no governance framework to guide trustee decisions when the original settlor was no longer able to participate.

This is one of the most common failure modes in intergenerational wealth: a trust structure built for the accumulation phase that has no formal framework to govern the transfer and preservation phase. Without intervention, the wealth that took a lifetime to build can dissipate within a generation — not through bad luck, but through the absence of intentional governance.