The purpose of estate tax planning is to maximize the assets you pass on to future generations by minimizing gift and estate taxes. Estate-tax strategies revolve around the use of irrevocable trusts. This article discusses the most common types of irrevocable trusts that are used to minimize gift and estate […]
❗ Key takeaway: If Valur ever went out of business, our established institutional partners–Charles Schwab, Anchorage, and others–would step in to act in your interest, so you can rest easy.
One set of questions we hear a lot from our customers: You’re a startup! Are you working with any more established companies? What happens if you go under?
We’re in this for the long haul, but if something goes wrong, you’re protected, because we work with established institutional partners at virtually every step of the process.
Once your trust is set up, your assets will sit with a “custodian” whose job it is to hold and protect the assets. In fact, you might not realize it, but this is true of all of your financial assets, no matter whether they’re in a trust, a 401(k), a taxable investment account, or even just in the bank. No matter the asset, it has to live somewhere, and there’s a centuries-old ecosystem built just for this purpose.
In our case, we work with different custodians depending on the type of asset we’re dealing with.
For traditional assets–publicly traded stock, exchange-traded funds, bonds, and the like–we partner with Charles Schwab. There’s not much that needs to be said here; Schwab has been around for more than 50 years, and it has developed the best-in-industry tools necessary to protect your assets and facilitate your transactions. That’s why almost half of all retail investments in the United States are held there.
For cryptocurrency, we work mostly with Anchorage and Coinbase. Both companies have handled billions of dollars of crypto transactions.
For startup equity and other alternative assets, we work with a variety of institutional partners depending on the company and the asset. If your equity is currently sitting in Carta or Shareworks, there’s a chance it can stay there. If not–if there are regulatory or other reasons the assets have to move–we work with Schwab and its alternative-asset partners to transfer the assets.
Now that your assets are in your trust and sitting with your custodian(s), your trust will need to be administered. We handle most of the real-world logistics, but Schwab acts as our backstop–they handle the technical requirements of trust reporting and filing your trust’s taxes.
In addition to those basics, if you have certain hard-to-value assets, we work with partners like Rhodium Strategies to perform the annual valuations necessary to calculate how much you’re entitled to withdraw from the trust every year.
If Valur ever went out of business, these partners would continue to act in your interest, and all you’d have to do is sign up a new trustee and investment manager. We future proof your trust by including a “secondary trustee” in the original documents—usually a family member or someone else you trust—who would be legally empowered to handle the logistics and financial management if Valur isn’t around anymore.
Schedule a time to chat with our team or get started at no cost and with no commitment.
We built a platform to give everyone access to the tax and wealth building tools of the ultra-rich like Mark Zuckerberg and Phil Knight. We make it simple and seamless for our customers to take advantage of these hard to access tax advantaged structures so you can build your wealth more efficiently at less than half the cost of competitors. From picking the best strategy to taking care of all the setup and ongoing overhead, we make it easy and have helped create more than $500m in wealth for our customers.
