Family Office Style Services
Retirement Planning
Investment Management
Estate & Insurance Planning
Tax Services
Retirement Planning
Our Retirement Income Planning Focus
Financial Independence
At Southernmost, our clients view retirement more as financial independence with many targeting independence far before the traditional age of 62-65. Regardless of which age you retire, it means you’ve achieved the ability to choose how you spend your days without money controlling your decisions.A Clear Path Forward
When you know where you’re going and how you’ll get there with a trusted partner guiding the way, the worry fades. You’ll have a straightforward, jargon-free plan implement by a team who knows you.An Intentional Approach
Financial freedom isn’t about slowing down. It’s about living fully on your own terms. You’re free to enjoy the parts of life you’ve been working toward; family, friends, travel, hobbies, or even a passion project knowing everything is taken care of.
What We Do
- Give you a clear, written plan that answers the essential questions:
- “How much can I spend today?”
- “Will my money last, or even leave a legacy?”
- “What happens if markets crash or I live longer than expected?”
- Build your portfolio with deliberate resilience. No one can predict the future, so your portfolio needs to provide income regardless of what the future holds.
- Coordinate everything: Social Security timing, IRMA thresholds, tax bracket management, and more, so that every decision works together and you keep more of what you’ve built.
- Handle the details, ongoing adjustments, and monitoring, while explaining it all in plain English so you’re confident in the job we’re doing behind the scenes.
Investment Management Services
Our Investment Philosophy
Tax-Forward
Integrating taxes as a part of our total financial plan ensures that all investment decisions account for the entire tax picture, including employment, business interests, outside investments and more.Risk-Focused
Risk management should be at the forefront of every investment decision. We not only focus on the risk of volatility (the portfolio moving up and down), but the risks of missing your savings goal, losing to inflation, under-performing expectations, running out of money in retirement, business cycles, and (inevitable) recessions.Evidence-Based
Building and managing portfolios through a disciplined, rules-based process means every decision is grounded in decades of peer-reviewed academic research and rigorous multi-cycle stress testing. Avoid decisions based on narrative driven storytelling.
What We Do
- Focus on minimizing taxes in our investment design to help you retain an additional 1-2% a year that would otherwise be paid out in taxes, and possibly even generate a tax loss while growing the portfolio.
- Create a custom index in house where you own individual stocks, rather than an outsourced ETF or Mutual Fund, to improve tax efficiency, lower costs and target your specific goal.
- Explore direct private real estate investment opportunities, which can have significant tax advantages, particularly for high income clients (*subject to regulatory qualifications).
- Manage risk for the various scenarios historically associated with severe market drawdowns, including inflation bouts, policy shifts, liquidity issues, and more.
- Stay transparent and focused on long-term endurance across market regimes.
Estate & Insurance Planning
Our Estate & Insurance Priorities
Straightforward Solutions
We prioritize simplicity and cost-effectiveness in estate planning and risk management. This means recommending solutions that are easy to understand, implement, and achieve your goal at the lowest possible expense.No Biases or Commissions
Our fee-only model guarantees genuinely unbiased advice free from product sales, commission incentives, or hidden conflicts. Our fees will always be transparent to provide you with the most clarity and guarantee fully fiduciary guidance.Advice & Implementation Combined
Having one advisory team take care of the estate and insurance process from beginning to end means you save time without bouncing back and forth between professionals.
What We Do
- Incorporate comprehensive estate planning and appropriate insurance recommendations into our family office-style advisory approach.
- Partner with a dedicated team of experienced estate planning attorneys on your behalf to manage the entire execution process, from document preparation through trust funding, and from insurance quoting through policy placement, without referring you to any third parties.
- Work with many of the top-rated insurance firms in the market on a no-commission basis (in fact we pay them for this privilege!), and shop around to ensure the lowest cost, best-fit solutions for you.
- As Southernmost recieves no comission or compensation from Insurers you receive quotes that are often 10%-30% below what you would find with traditional insurance providers.
Tax Services
Our Tax Philosophy
Full Financial Integration
We align your tax planning and preparation with your retirement planning, investment allocation, estate planning, and insurance strategy to provide a seamless experience and elevate the quality and intentionality of every financial decision.Start-to-Finish Support
To simplfy our clients finances we can even file the tax returns on your behalf, if preferred. With our Family Office service, you don’t have to keep bouncing between different professionals.
What We Do
- Coordinate your taxes with your investments, estate, insurance, and retirement strategies, all under one roof.
- Implement investment and retirement decisions that make the best ‘after tax’ sense.
- Whether we file your taxes or not, you will still have your tax situation optimized across your total financial picture, including income from your job, investment portfolio, insurance decisions, estate planning, and any other income-generating sources.
What Makes Us Different
In-house
Investment Expertise
Most firms drop you into off-the-shelf products and call it a day. We build properly diversified portfolios tailored to your comfort level and long-term goals.
Fully Integrated
Financial & Tax Planning
Good returns don’t matter if taxes eat away at half of them. We build every plan with the potential lifetime tax impact in mind.
Conflict-Free Advice
We always offer impartial advice that isn’t biased by commissions, so you know exactly what you’re getting and why.
Listen, we get it.
Meeting with a Financial Advisor can feel overwhelming and intimidating. A quick call with us can
help take this stress off your chest.
Our transparency means we can keep the focus on you and your situation as the highest priority.
In fact, here’s exactly what you can expect:
Discuss your situation
See if we’re a good fit
Talk about next steps