Coordinating your financial advisory team: advisor, CPA, and attorney.

The coordination problem

Here's how it usually works: your investment advisor manages your portfolio, your CPA handles your tax return, and your estate attorney drafted your trust documents several years ago. Each is competent in their domain. But none of them has the full picture, and none is responsible for making sure the pieces fit together.

The result is predictable:

• Your advisor harvests capital losses in your taxable account without knowing your CPA already offset gains elsewhere — the loss goes to waste.
• Your estate attorney's trust structure assumes a certain asset titling, but your investment accounts are titled differently — the plan doesn't execute as intended.
• You do a large Roth conversion in a year when your CPA could have told you it would push you into a higher IRMAA bracket — a $2,400/year Medicare surcharge for two years that could have been avoided with a phone call.
• Your insurance specialist sells you a policy your estate attorney would have structured as an ILIT for estate tax purposes — the proceeds now go through your taxable estate instead of passing tax-free to heirs.

Each gap individually looks small. Cumulatively, over a decade of uncoordinated planning, they can cost a $10M household hundreds of thousands of dollars.

The four specialists you need at $5M+

1. Fee-only wealth advisor (the integrator)

The wealth advisor is your financial quarterback — the professional who sees your complete financial picture and coordinates everyone else. They manage your investments, but more importantly they own the overall strategy: how your tax plan, estate plan, insurance, and investment plan interact.

At $5M+, this should be a fee-only fiduciary: a registered investment adviser (RIA) who charges transparent fees (typically 0.5–0.8% of AUM or a flat retainer) and earns no commissions from product sales. The conflict-free structure matters at this level because the strategy recommendations — direct indexing, concentrated stock diversification, alternative investments — carry significant fee economics for advisors who aren't purely fee-only. See our wirehouse vs fee-only comparison for a detailed breakdown of how the fee structures differ.

The integrator role means the advisor:

• Maintains a consolidated view of all accounts across all custodians and entities
• Initiates quarterly conversations with your CPA before estimated tax deadlines
• Reviews estate documents annually and flags misaligned asset titling or beneficiary designations
• Coordinates with your insurance specialist on whether new policies should be owned personally, by trust, or by an LLC

2. CPA / tax advisor

Your CPA handles compliance (filing returns) and planning (minimizing what you owe before year-end). At $5M+, the planning side is where value lives. The gap is that most CPAs are reactive — they see what happened after December 31 and report it. A proactive CPA with visibility into your investment and estate moves before they happen is worth 3–5× their annual fee in tax savings.

What good coordination looks like:

• CPA receives a projected year-end income and gains summary from your advisor by October, not January
• Roth conversion sizing is a joint advisor-CPA decision: how much to convert without triggering next year's IRMAA bracket or a marginal rate spike
• Business income, K-1s from pass-through entities, and AMT exposure are modeled together with investment income — not siloed
• Year-end tax-loss harvesting is coordinated: the advisor knows which positions the CPA has already designated elsewhere

3. Estate attorney

Your estate attorney drafts and updates your core documents: will, revocable living trust, powers of attorney, healthcare directives, and any irrevocable trusts (SLATs, ILITs, GRATs, dynasty trusts). The key word is updates — estate plans are often drafted once and left to age, even as your family grows, tax laws change, and asset values move.

The 2026 estate and gift tax exemption is $15M per person ($30M per couple) under the OBBBA¹ — permanent, not sunsetting. That's a radically different planning environment than a few years ago. If your trust documents reference a smaller exemption or strategies designed for a sunset that never happened, they may be actively suboptimal now.

What good coordination looks like:

• Your wealth advisor reviews estate documents when they come on board and flags asset titling mismatches — assets that weren't funded into the trust, beneficiary designations that contradict the estate plan
• Major life events (inheritance, business sale, divorce, new child) trigger an estate review proactively — not because you remembered to call
• GRAT, SLAT, or dynasty trust strategies are modeled jointly with the CPA before the attorney drafts — so the tax and estate math is validated before legal fees are incurred

4. Insurance specialist

At $5M+, insurance stops being about protection and starts being a planning tool: irrevocable life insurance trusts (ILITs), private placement life insurance (PPLI), and premium financing for estate liquidity are all legitimate strategies for the right household. But they're also commission-heavy products that attract advisors with the wrong incentives.

The right setup: a fee-only wealth advisor evaluates your insurance needs objectively and refers you to an independent broker for implementation. The broker shops the market for you; the advisor has no financial stake in which policy you buy or whether you buy at all.

What good coordination looks like:

• Policy ownership (personal vs. trust vs. LLC) is decided with input from both your estate attorney and your CPA before purchase
• Premium financing decisions weigh borrowing costs against the estate tax calculus — a joint conversation between the advisor, CPA, and insurance specialist
• Annual policy reviews happen as part of your overall plan review, not as standalone insurance-company-initiated calls

Where coordination most commonly breaks down

Asset titling mismatches

You execute a complex estate plan with irrevocable trusts and carefully structured gifting. Then your custodian-held investment account stays titled in your personal name because nobody thought to inform the custodian. The trust is correctly drafted; the assets never made it in. When you die, those assets are counted in your taxable estate.

Fix: require your wealth advisor to verify that all account titling, beneficiary designations, and trust funding are aligned after any estate plan update.

Roth conversion timing

Roth conversions are a powerful tool for HNW households — especially those with large traditional IRAs who expect higher tax rates in the future, or who want to reduce future required minimum distributions. But the optimal conversion amount in any year depends on your total taxable income: ordinary wages, capital gains, pass-through income, rental income, and Social Security (if applicable) — all need to be modeled together.

Without coordination, conversions happen in a vacuum. With coordination, the advisor and CPA model the conversion amount to stay just under IRMAA thresholds, avoid AMT triggers, or optimize the §199A QBI deduction (made permanent by OBBBA) for business owners.

Tax-loss harvesting without a gains picture

Your advisor harvests $80,000 in losses from your taxable account in December. Meanwhile your CPA knows you have $60,000 in gains from a real estate sale that quarter, $40,000 of which could have been offset by the harvested losses — but the rest of the losses are now stranded as a capital loss carryforward, used $3,000/year for the next 27 years.

With coordination, the advisor receives a gains picture by November and harvests specifically against identified gains, optimizing the immediate benefit instead of building up excess carryforwards. See our direct indexing calculator to estimate how systematic harvesting adds up over a multi-year horizon.

Insurance bought outside the plan

A life insurance agent presents you with a $3M permanent policy. You buy it in your own name because it's simpler. Three years later, your estate attorney informs you that if you had purchased it through an ILIT, the $3M death benefit would have passed outside your taxable estate — potentially saving $600K+ in estate taxes for your heirs. You have a three-year look-back window for existing policies transferred to a trust, but the clock is already running.

Building an integrated team: practical steps

Start with the integrator

The wealth advisor is the logical hub of coordination because they have the most complete financial picture. When evaluating fee-only RIAs, ask directly: "Do you coordinate with my CPA? How often? What do you send them, and what do they send you?" The answer tells you whether they've actually built coordination into their process or whether it's a marketing talking point.

Our family office services guide covers how fee-only RIAs delivering family-office-style services structure the coordination function — and how to evaluate whether a given RIA actually has the capacity to do it.

Establish a shared calendar

Coordination requires scheduled touchpoints, not ad hoc calls when something goes wrong. The minimum cadence for a $5M+ household:

• March/April: Post-tax-season debrief — what happened, what to do differently
• August/September: Mid-year planning — Roth conversion sizing, gains/loss position, charitable gifting timing
• October/November: Year-end planning — final conversion amount, loss harvesting, gifting before December 31
• January/February: Estate review — beneficiary designations, titling, any changes from prior year events

Create a master summary document

One document — maintained by your wealth advisor and shared with CPA and attorney — that lists: all accounts and their titling, all entities (trusts, LLCs, partnerships), current beneficiary designations, and major open items. This document doesn't replace legal or tax records; it's the single-page map that everyone works from so nobody is flying blind.

Define who initiates

Most coordination failures happen because everyone assumes someone else is making the call. Define it explicitly: the wealth advisor is responsible for initiating the quarterly advisor-CPA conversation. The estate attorney is responsible for initiating an annual review. The insurance specialist sends an annual policy summary to both the advisor and the attorney. When everyone knows who initiates, it actually happens.

What to look for in a coordinator

When evaluating whether a fee-only RIA can actually serve as the integrator for your team, the due diligence questions are:

1. Do they have a tax-aware investment process? A true integrator runs tax-loss harvesting, Roth conversion sizing, and asset location with real-time visibility into your tax position — not as an afterthought. Ask about the asset location process specifically.
2. Do they review estate documents as part of onboarding? The best firms include a document review and asset titling audit in their onboarding process, not as an add-on.
3. How do they handle insurance? A fee-only advisor should have no financial incentive to recommend insurance. If they sell or earn commissions on insurance products, the coordination incentive is compromised.
4. What is their CPA coordination process? Ask to see the proforma of what they send your CPA and when. If they don't have a template or a process, coordination is aspiration, not practice.
5. Client-to-advisor ratio: Coordination takes time. An advisor managing 150+ families can't meaningfully integrate all four specialists for each client. Ask how many families the advisor personally oversees and what the bandwidth is for proactive coordination.

Get matched with an HNW wealth specialist

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Sources

1. IRS Estate and Gift Taxes — $15M per-person estate and gift tax exemption for 2026, made permanent by the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA, Pub. L. 119-21, July 2025). Values verified as of April 2026.
2. SEC: Investment Advisers — Overview of RIA registration requirements and fiduciary duty under the Investment Advisers Act of 1940.
3. Kitces.com: Coordinating the Financial Planning Team — Framework for advisor-led coordination with CPAs and estate attorneys.
4. IRS Publication 590-B (Distributions from IRAs) — Required minimum distribution rules and Roth conversion guidance.
5. IRS Rev. Proc. 2025-32: 2026 Tax Inflation Adjustments — IRMAA thresholds, standard deduction, and other indexed amounts used in year-end planning coordination.