Services
Four disciplines, one strategy
Most financial lives fail at the seams — the portfolio doesn't know what the tax return is doing, and the estate documents contradict both. Our work is keeping all four disciplines pointed at the same plan.
Financial planning
The plan is the product
A living, scenario-tested plan for retirement readiness, education funding, major purchases, and the what-ifs in between — revisited every year, not printed and shelved.
A couple, 54 and 56, wanted to know if one of them could step back to part-time. We modeled it three ways and found the honest answer: yes — if they delayed one pension by two years.
A composite of real situations — details changed, arithmetic kept honest.
What this includes
- Retirement readiness analysis in honest scenario bands
- Cash-flow, savings-rate, and debt strategy
- Education and major-goal funding plans
- Insurance and risk-gap review (we sell none of it)
- Equity compensation and concentrated-stock strategy
Investment management
Diversified, low-cost, disciplined
Globally diversified portfolios built from low-cost funds, sized to your plan rather than to a market forecast, and rebalanced with discipline instead of adrenaline.
In a down year, the disciplined version of our job is unheroic: harvest the losses, rebalance into the decline, and talk a family out of selling at the bottom. That year matters more than the up ones.
A composite of real situations — details changed, arithmetic kept honest.
What this includes
- An Investment Policy Statement you can actually read
- Global diversification across stocks, bonds, and real assets
- Systematic rebalancing and tax-loss harvesting
- Assets held at an independent custodian, in your name
- No proprietary products — nothing we're paid to place
Tax coordination
It's what you keep that compounds
We coordinate with your CPA so the plan, the portfolio, and the tax return act like one strategy — asset location, withdrawal sequencing, Roth conversions, and charitable timing.
A retired client's 'low-income years' between 62 and 70 became a series of measured Roth conversions — the same lifetime income, meaningfully less lifetime tax. No product was sold to do it.
A composite of real situations — details changed, arithmetic kept honest.
What this includes
- Asset location across taxable, tax-deferred, and Roth accounts
- Multi-year Roth conversion analysis
- Withdrawal sequencing in retirement
- Charitable strategy: donor-advised funds, appreciated stock, QCDs
- Annual coordination call with your CPA before year-end
Estate coordination
The plan should outlive its authors
We make sure the estate documents your attorney drafts actually match how your accounts are titled and who your beneficiaries are — then help the next generation understand the plan.
After a client passed, her daughter's first call was to us — not because anything was complicated, but because nothing was. The documents, titles, and beneficiaries all said the same thing.
A composite of real situations — details changed, arithmetic kept honest.
What this includes
- Estate document and beneficiary alignment review
- Account titling and trust-funding follow-through
- Family meetings — on your terms, at your pace
- Charitable legacy and gifting strategy
- A letter-of-instruction framework your family can follow
Who we serve
Families with more at stake than at leisure
Most Cornerstone families are professionals, founders, and retirees in and around New England — people whose financial lives outgrew a brokerage app but who have no appetite for being sold to. Common doorways in:
- A retirement date that just became real
- Equity compensation concentrating faster than it's diversifying
- A business sale on the two-to-five-year horizon
- An inheritance, a loss, or another sudden transition
- A portfolio scattered across five custodians and two decades
Still building? Our flat-fee Foundations planning engagement carries no minimum at all.
The first step is free
Not sure which discipline you need first?
That's precisely what an introduction is for. Bring the mess — scattered accounts, old documents, half-finished plans. We've never once been shocked.