“Planning Under Pressure”: How Today’s Tax Rules Are Rewriting Family Wealth Conversations
As the tax landscape evolves and families stare down a once‑in‑a‑generation wealth transfer, advisors are being forced to rethink how they connect portfolio decisions with long-term estate plans. Andrew J. Plum, Managing Partner and Investment Committee Head at Loxahatchee Capital, an Elevation Point partner firm, has a front-row seat to that shift. After 15 years as a private wealth advisor at UBS, he co‑founded Loxahatchee in 2025 to work more intensively with ultra‑high-net-worth families at the intersection of investment strategy, estate planning, and family governance.
Plum discusses how current tax rules are changing the urgency and tone of planning conversations, what smart families are doing about complex generational and business‑succession issues, and the costly mistakes he sees when investment and estate strategies are built in silos.
CM: How are recent and potential tax law changes influencing the urgency of estate planning conversations among your clients?
AP: The conversations have shifted meaningfully. For years, families were bracing for a significant reduction in the estate tax exemption, and a lot of planning was done under that assumption. With the exemption now frozen at $15 million per individual, there’s less panic — but there’s actually more nuance to navigate. Some families who aggressively funded irrevocable trusts in anticipation of a lower exemption now find themselves in a different position, where it may actually make sense to pull certain assets back into the surviving spouse’s estate to capture a stepped-up basis at death. On the other end, families with larger estates still have real urgency to lock in that exemption now by funding trusts, because any growth on those transferred assets will compound outside the taxable estate for potentially decades. The law may have settled for the moment, but the planning conversations are as active as ever.
CM: Are you seeing families accelerate wealth transfer strategies in response to anticipated policy shifts?
AP: Yes, and the urgency is real. Even with the exemption currently frozen at $15 million per individual, there’s no guarantee that figure holds permanently. For larger estates, the smart move is to act now. Funding irrevocable trusts while the exemption is favorable means you’re grandfathered in if the rules change down the road. More importantly, any growth that occurs on assets transferred into those trusts happens outside the grantor’s estate entirely, which compounds the benefit significantly over time. Waiting to see what happens is itself a decision, and often not the right one.
CM: What are the biggest challenges families face when preparing for generational wealth transfer?
AP: One of the most common challenges is that circumstances change in ways no one anticipated. A perfect example is the privately held business: a family might fund a dynasty trust with discounted private company stock early on, with reasonable expectations about its future value. Then the business sells to a private equity firm, goes public, or experiences dramatic growth and what was intended as a modest gift of a few million dollars becomes $100 million or more sitting in a trust that younger family members may not be prepared to steward. The original intent was sound, but the facts changed. That’s why plans need to be revisited every few years, not set and forgotten.
CM: Are you seeing differences in how younger generations approach wealth, risk and legacy planning?
AP: The common narrative today is that younger investors have an extremely cost conscious, do-it-yourself mentality. To a certain extent this is true. Younger investors have more access to information and tools than any generation before them. These tools are indeed life changing, as they help drive convenience, and efficient decisions daily. That said, rising generations still value personalized advice from trusted professionals. AI is immensely helpful in so many areas of life, but when it comes to the complicated, potentially life-changing decisions around portfolio management, and generational planning, the younger folks understand the need for expert advice, stewardship of family values, and precise execution. These are all areas where the right wealth practitioner can be the difference maker. There is also a sense that this class of investor no longer has the drive to work hard and build wealth. This has not been my experience. Today’s young investors have every bit as much drive as their parents, although they may have different personal interests and consumption habits.
CM: What strategies are most effective for business owners navigating succession planning today?
AP: Succession planning for business owners works best when the tax strategy and the family strategy are designed together from the start. One of the most powerful — and often underutilized — approaches is transferring discounted private company stock into a trust early, while the business is still growing and the valuation is relatively modest. If the business eventually sells or goes public, that growth happens entirely outside the taxable estate. The challenge is that what seems like a straightforward gift at the time can become something far larger than anyone anticipated — which is why the structure of the trust and the governance around it matter enormously. Family limited partnerships and LLC structures can also play a valuable role, not just for the tax and discounting benefits, but as a way to bring the next generation into the family enterprise thoughtfully, with real responsibilities and appropriate guardrails, before full stewardship is handed over.
CM: What are the most common mistakes families make when investment and estate planning are not coordinated?
AP: The most consistent gap we see is that the investment strategy doesn’t reflect the actual structure of the plan. Assets end up in the wrong accounts. For example, tax-inefficient investments sitting in taxable accounts when they should be in tax-deferred structures, simply because no one looked at the full picture holistically. But the subtler mistake is applying the same investment lens to assets that have completely different purposes. The assets a grantor needs to fund their lifestyle, support their charitable interests, and sustain them through retirement require balance and income generation. A dynasty trust designed to benefit multiple generations over the next 50 to 100 years should look nothing like that, it should be invested with the long time horizon it has, much closer to how an endowment would be managed. Treating those two pools identically is leaving a significant amount of value on the table.
CM: If you could give families one piece of advice for the next five years of tax and estate uncertainty, what would it be?
AP: Don’t let a good plan become outdated. The biggest risk we see isn’t that families never did the planning, most affluent families make a real effort to surround themselves with competent professionals. The risk is that time passes, circumstances change, and no one goes back to check whether the plan still fits today’s reality. Tax laws shift, businesses grow in unexpected ways, family structures evolve. The families that come out ahead are the ones who treat estate planning not as a one-time event, but as an ongoing process, reviewing regularly, coordinating across advisors, and making sure their strategies are still aligned with where they are today.
