In this scenario, Alecia and William met in their early fifties. Both were successful, independent, and deeply committed to their adult children from prior marriages. Each brought assets into the relationship, along with shared values: protect the surviving spouse and be fair to all children. Their intention is simple but non-negotiable: to care for each other fully during their lifetimes while preserving a clear, equitable legacy for their combined families.

Over time, Alecia and William would come to understand that remarriage in midlife carries structural risk when planning is vague or driven by emotion. Their concerns are grounded in the practical realities of how money, families, and legal structures work, and how to protect the surviving spouse without unintentionally disadvantaging children from a prior marriage. They recognize that their assets didn’t all behave the same way, and that a simple will wouldn’t reliably control the outcome they intended.

They also might face tough questions about the future. What would happen if one spouse outlived the other but later lost capacity? What if decisions had to be made by someone else, under pressure? Alecia and William would want to provide clarity without creating tension or ambiguity between themselves or their adult children. Beneath it would be a shared concern about exposure: that without structure, assets could be vulnerable to future partners, creditors, or even the surviving spouses decision. They would know they didn’t want a plan built on assumptions, trust alone, or the hope that everyone would “do the right thing.”

How Moorgate would work with Alecia and William:

Working alongside a trusted attorney, Moorgate would guide Alecia and William through a legacy planning framework designed specifically for second marriages with adult children. The approach might rely on a marital trust structure -- one that intentionally separates emotion from execution.

An approach to their situation includes, but goes beyond, typical investment guidance. A clear plan would establish outcomes from the moment it might ever need to be activated upon the death of the first spouse to take care of final expenses and taxes, and establish marital assets (investments, real estate, and business interests) into marital trust structure to support the surviving spouse for life, providing access to funds for everyday living, healthcare, and long-term care. Independent co-trustees are appointed to ensure oversight, transparency, and protection from unilateral or emotionally driven decisions.

Upon the death of the second spouse, the trust could again operate with clarity. Final expenses would be paid, and remaining assets divided equally among all descendants, regardless of which spouse they came from. Distributions could be set up to flow through descendant trusts, adding an additional layer of protection against creditors, divorce, or poor timing.

This structure would give Alecia and William exactly what they were looking for. The surviving spouse would be protected financially and legally. No child could be accidentally favored, excluded, or disadvantaged. Assets would be shielded from outside influence and future conflict. Most importantly, everyone would understand the rules long before they ever mattered. Moorgate would help Alecia and William replace “we trust everyone will do the right thing” with a structure designed to deliver the desired outcome.

In this scenario, Jordan would be a senior engineer at a large, publicly traded technology company with two children and a spouse who stayed home to raise them. As a family, they want to move closer to his wife’s parents, but Jordan feels locked into an in-person role that made relocation feel impossible. His employer uses a rolling RSU strategy specifically designed to maximize retention. Jordan’s base salary is $200,000, but his total annual compensation varies between $350,000 and $420,000, driven by quarterly stock grants (RSUs) tied to company stock performance. His RSU grants are issued on a four-year schedule, vesting quarterly. Each year brings a new grant, meaning multiple tranches would be vesting (and possible taxation) at the same time on an imprecise value.

The effect is intentional. Jordan would always be “one year away” from a meaningful vest, making the cost of leaving feel high and leaving the family feeling stuck, unable to move closer to loved ones. Taxes play an large role – after federal and state taxes, Medicare, and net investment income tax, more than 45 percent would disappear immediately. Jordan wouldn’t be underpaid but he would be overexposed to a single stock and a tax structure outside his control.

How Moorgate would work with Jordan:

Jordan’s goal is clear. Within the next 12 to 18 months, he wants to leave big tech and transition into high-value advisory consulting that allows him to work from anywhere. To do that responsibly, he would need to reduce the tax drag of RSU income, avoid a sudden compensation cliff, convert volatile equity into diversified wealth, and build a business structure for himself that creates long-term flexibility. His challenge is RSUs are W-2 income: no deductions, no expense offsets, and no control of grant vesting. Planning would have to come before resignation.

The strategy would begin with timing. Jordan would delay resignation until he gets two high-value quarterly vests, allowing him to maximize earned equity before stepping away. A portion of vested shares would be sold immediately to reduce single-stock concentration risk, while gains from older RSU tranches would be harvested opportunistically to offset manage taxes. Paired with his other investment losses, the net tax impact of his investment and RSU gains are now balanced.

Next would come entity formation. Together, Andrew and Jordan would evaluate corporate structures and possibly establish an LLC S-Corp for his advisory work. As an employee of the LLC, versus independent for the company, he becomes both an owner and salaried employee to maximize benefits as an employee such as his own matching 401K. The business can is able to deduct expenses legitimately to offset income, something impossible under a W-2 structure. Income bridging would be critical. This would reduce pressure to rush decisions or overpay taxes during the transition.

Finally, advanced tax planning could reshape the picture. Andrew would bring in a tax strategist to support the plan. Retirement contributions would shift from capped employer plans to a solo 401(k) and backdoor strategies. Health benefits would move under the business. Future income would become more controllable, more deductible, and more deferrable.

In this scenario, Jordan would step into a consulting business generating comparable gross income at a lower effective tax rate, with reduced concentration risk and the ability to reinvest profits intentionally rather than reactively while gaining the freedom to live and work where his family wanted to be.

In this scenario, Lisa is 46: successful, financially disciplined, with real assets, a career, and a child who had just started college. Tuition would be split with her ex-husband, a workable arrangement on paper that nonetheless introduced layers of coordination. She would be at a stage where decisions compounded quickly: college funding, peak earning years, and aging parents, among other considerations.

Lisa would also already have a financial advisor. Technically, everything would be “fine.” That fine would look like quarterly calls that followed the same script each time, a rushed lunch once a year, and conversations filled with acronyms. Retirement would be discussed often, but in ways that felt performative and oddly disconnected from her actual life. Terms like RMDs, tax efficiency, and glide paths would be mentioned casually. Lisa would nod along, even when she wasn’t fully sure how any of it applied to her. She would often leave meetings feeling like she should have asked more questions, but wouldn’t want to sound uninformed.

How Moorgate would work with Lisa:

From the first conversation, the experience would feel different. The focus would be on listening to how Lisa experienced her financial reality, not just what she owned. The discussion would explore her concerns about cash flow during the college years, how her sense of financial security had shifted over time, and the questions that kept resurfacing but never seemed to make it into her quarterly reviews. Rather than glossing over retirement planning, Moorgate would map multiple scenarios with Lisa: continuing at her current pace, pulling back in her late fifties, or needing flexibility sooner if life changed. The numbers would be explained in plain language. Questions would be encouraged, not hurried.

The planning would extend well beyond investments. Together, they would work through how to balance tuition obligations without compromising Lisa’s long-term future, explore tax strategies that reflected her earning years now, and clarify liquidity: what was accessible, what was tied up, and why keeping on top of that is important. Lisa would leave meetings feeling grounded rather than disconnected. Moorgate would give her confidence in her decisions and the reassurance that she wasn’t navigating this stage of life on her own.

In this scenario, Michael would be in his early forties with a strong income and steady career momentum. He would have invested consistently and diversified broadly; his balance sheet would be healthy, and his goals straightforward. What he would want is professional investment management: clear structure, real strategy, and a different approach. Michael would be comfortable taking risk, but only when it was intentional. His ask would be direct: keep the majority of his portfolio diversified and risk-managed, while carving out a defined portion for more assertive strategies such as options, calls, puts, and tactical trades. He wouldn’t be interested in gambling, but he would want optionality with rules.

Here’s how Moorgate would work with Michael:

From the outset, the conversation would shift away from traditional risk-tolerance assessments and toward risk design. Rather than blending everything together and hoping it worked, Moorgate would help Michael segment his portfolio into distinct sleeves, each with a clear purpose. The foundation of the strategy would be a core–satellite structure. The majority of the portfolio would be allocated to a core designed for durability. This portion would emphasize diversification across asset classes, geographies, and sectors, with disciplined, tax-aware rebalancing. The objective wouldn’t be excitement or short-term wins, it would be steady compounding over time.

The remaining minority percentage would be intentionally designated as Michael’s opportunistic sleeve. This would be his risk capital, governed by clearly defined guardrails. Together, Andrew and Michael would establish maximum exposure limits, position sizing rules, liquidity requirements, and predetermined loss thresholds. Options strategies, tactical trades, and higher-volatility ideas would live entirely within this sleeve. Wins would be allowed to accrue without distorting the broader portfolio, and losses would remain survivable by design. Importantly, this segment would be actively monitored so risk never quietly crept into areas where it didn’t belong.

Before working with Moorgate, Michael’s frustration wouldn’t be about performance, it would be about structure. Risk would have felt either discouraged entirely or loosely tolerated without a framework. With Moorgate, there would be a clear separation between long-term capital and speculative capital. Michael would have confidence that aggressive strategies wouldn’t jeopardize his broader financial foundation. And he would have a framework that allowed him to express conviction without blowing up the plan, supported by ongoing oversight that simply isn’t available at large firms, particularly given Moorgate’s intentionally limited client base.

Just as important, Michael would never feel scrutinized for wanting both stability and upside. The strategy would reflect a reality many investors in their forties face: you need to think more realistically about risk, but you shouldn’t be forced to sit entirely on the sidelines either. Moorgate wouldn’t promise to beat a benchmark. They would give Michael a portfolio designed to match how he actually thinks about money: measured, curious, and willing to take risk where it belongs.

In this scenario, the Harris family has quietly built significant wealth over two generations. What began as a successful operating business has grown into a complex balance sheet that includes marketable investments, real estate holdings, private investments, and multiple family trusts. As the second generation steps into leadership, the family finds itself functioning as a small family office without having set out to create one. They have accountants. They have attorneys. They have investment managers. What they don’t have is a central advisory partner helping them see the whole picture as they live their busy lives. Decisions are made in pieces. Tax strategy lives with one advisor. Investment decisions with another. Trust structures and estate documents exist, but are rarely revisited as living, evolving tools. Family conversations about distributions, responsibilities, and future roles happen informally and often reactively. Nothing is broken but things feel fragmented.

How Moorgate would work with the Harris family:

Moorgate would position the relationship as advisory, not directive. The work would begin by understanding the family system as much as the financial one: how decisions are currently made, where friction points are, what concerns the senior generation, and what responsibilities the next generation feels unprepared to inherit.

Rather than taking over asset management, Moorgate would focus on orchestration and clarity. Existing structures - trusts, entities, investment allocations, liquidity sources - would be reviewed together and with other legal and tax advisors. This would include evaluating how trusts are funded, whether distribution policies align with intent, and whether current gifting strategies still reflect the family’s goals and values.

In this scenario, think of Moorgate as almost “case managing” (coordinate? Orchestrate?) all the moving pieces and people. Moorgate would also help the family establish a shared framework for decision-making—grounded in both financial discipline and values. Together, the family would clarify what they want their wealth to enable, what they want it to protect against, and how those values should inform decisions around investing, spending, gifting, and long-term stewardship. This framework would provide practical clarity: which decisions require collective alignment, which can remain individual, and how tradeoffs are evaluated when priorities compete. Moorgate would help guide trust and gifting decisions to be more intentional and better coordinated. Conversations would extend beyond tax efficiency to include purpose, timing, and impact, helping the family think through how and when wealth is transferred, and what it is meant to support across generations.

As the advisory relationship develops, Moorgate would become a steady presence during key moments: preparing for liquidity events, helping clarify intention around trust updates or gifting strategies before decisions are finalized. Advisor advice would be translated into plain language so every family member can participate meaningfully. Importantly, Moorgate would not (does not need to) replace the family office structure, it would strengthen it. By serving as a neutral, experienced advisor at the center, Moorgate would reduce the burden on individual family members to hold everything together and lower the emotional temperature around high-stakes decisions. By providing guidance, perspective, coordination and continuity, Moorgate would allow the family to spend less time managing complexity and more time stewarding what they’ve built, together.