Letters to clients.

I hope you know that I’m constantly asking myself one question about the families I serve: is what I’m doing for them the best I can do, or is there more?

After a great deal of thought, study, and preparation, I’ve concluded there is more. So I’m writing with some news I’m genuinely proud of. I’ve launched Elevate Wealth LLC, a sister firm to Duncan Funding, and I’m now offering full investment management alongside the planning and protection work we’ve been doing together.

Over the past eight years, we’ve built something real together: retirement income plans, and life insurance designed to serve you at every stage of life. It protects your family today, it builds a private, tax-advantaged reserve you can draw on in retirement, and it passes on a lasting legacy to the people you love. I believe in that work as strongly today as the day we started it. It is, and will remain, a cornerstone of how I serve you. In retirement, that reserve becomes even more valuable, because it gives us an income source that doesn’t depend on what the market is doing that year.

But here is the truth I’ve had to face: even a life insurance plan built to the very limit the tax code allows, the kind of design work I’ve specialized in for years, is only part of a family’s picture. If the rest of their wealth sat unattended, I’d still be doing them a disservice. Elevate Wealth exists to end that. From now on, the plan, the protection, the taxes, and the investments can be managed as one coordinated whole, by one person who knows your entire picture, your family values, and answers to you for all of it.

I want to be straightforward about what I believe on the investment side, because you’re entitled to the philosophy behind the recommendation. I believe that owning diversified portfolios of the great companies of America and the world has been, and remains, the most reliable way a family grows its wealth and its income faster than the cost of living rises. In the same breath: those portfolios periodically endure significant, sometimes frightening, temporary declines along the way. Both things are true. My job is to build a plan that expects both, and then to stand next to you through the second one so you collect the rewards of the first. The beauty of what we’ve already built is that your private reserve makes patience easier. When markets are stormy, we’ll have income that doesn’t require selling anything at a bad price.

One thing I want to say plainly: this has nothing whatever to do with recent market performance. Markets are near their highs as I write, and I’d be sending you this same letter if they were down 30%. This is a fundamental step in how I serve you, not a reaction to a headline.

Nothing about our existing work together changes unless you want it to. Everything we’ve built through Duncan Funding continues exactly as before; Elevate Wealth simply completes the picture. What I’d welcome is a conversation. Over the coming weeks I’ll be reaching out to schedule time with each of you to walk through what this means, answer everything (including, candidly, exactly how it works and what it costs), and see whether it’s right for your family. If it is, wonderful. If it isn’t, our relationship is unchanged and just as valued.

Thank you for the trust you’ve placed in me these past years. It is the privilege of my professional life, and this step exists to be worthy of it.