Wealth Management

I do not manage money. I am not a licensed investment adviser, I hold no client assets, I take no discretion over anyone’s account, and I do not recommend securities, funds or allocations. If what you want is someone to run a portfolio, that person is not me.

What I do is narrower and more useful for a family living across borders. I make introductions to regulated institutional partners through a dedicated specialist private-capital practice, and I make sure the mandate reflects the rest of your position — the citizenship, the property, the entities, the tax residency. My job is to stop the portfolio being designed in ignorance of everything else, which is the failure I see most often.

The conventional wealth-management model assumes a single life: one country of residence, one currency, one tax authority, one custodian, one estate regime. Almost none of it survives contact with a globally mobile family. Income arrives in one currency, school fees and construction draws go out in another, and the assets sit in a third under a regulator nobody at the table has thought about.

A US-dollar portfolio is a hedge for a family whose costs are in dollars and a bet for a family whose costs are not. Which of those you are is a question about your life, not about markets, and it is why this sits inside the wider private client advisory work instead of standing beside it as a product.

The Eastern Caribbean removes one currency problem and quietly creates another. The Eastern Caribbean dollar has been pegged at EC$2.70 to US$1 since 1976 and the Barbados dollar at BBD 2 to US$1 since July 1975. The trap is what that stability persuades people to skip: a family whose income, portfolio, home currency and Caribbean costs are all dollar-linked has removed currency volatility from the plan and, in the same motion, removed currency diversification from it. That can be the right position, but it should not be an accident, and usually it is.

Custody — who actually holds the assets, under which regulator — is a different question from which bank you use. What matters is whose insolvency law applies when an institution fails and whether client assets are legally segregated from the institution’s own. The region gives reasons to care: Allen Stanford’s roughly US$7 billion scheme ran through Stanford International Bank in Antigua, and FTX collapsed from its Bahamas headquarters. Both ran on light supervision.

The jurisdiction the account sits in also decides what a depositor can actually recover, and around here the answer is smaller than most families assume. That is why custody and cash get designed alongside the banking relationships, never after them.

The statistic families quote at me — ninety percent of fortunes gone by the third generation — is folklore, and I have taken it apart in detail. The pattern underneath it is not. Hendrik Bessembinder’s study of roughly 26,000 US stocks from 1926 to 2016 found that just 4.3% of them accounted for all net wealth creation above Treasury bills, while 57.4% returned less over their lifetimes than one-month T-bills.

The Caribbean version is quieter. A family ends up with a business, a home, a rental unit, a local bank relationship and a currency — all on one island, all exposed to the same tourist season and the same hurricane track. That is not five assets; it is one asset wearing five hats. I sell Caribbean real estate for a living, which is precisely why I argue against overweighting it: a villa is illiquid and management-intensive, and one bought to support a citizenship by investment application is not liquid reserve.

Plenty of families who ask me about this do not need it, which is why who this practice is for is written down. If your assets are overwhelmingly US-situs, your tax residency is not changing and your existing manager is competent and reasonably priced, moving the portfolio buys complexity and costs money. I will say so, and the conversation ends there.

That is doubly true where a US passport is in the family. The United States taxes its citizens on worldwide income wherever they live and whatever second passport they hold, which is why a second citizenship is insurance rather than a tax play and why holding assets abroad adds reporting obligations without lowering the bill — international tax planning work, not an allocation discussion.

Where an introduction is worth making, it is because something specific changed: a custodian that will not support the new residence, or currency exposure nobody has priced. Even then, what my team and I own is the brief the licensed firms are given.