Our approach
Somebody has to hold all of it at once.
Coordination is either somebody's actual job or it quietly becomes nobody's. At Veritas it is the job, and this page describes what that means in practice.
What coordination looks like day to day
Every specialist you work with is optimizing their own piece. Your CPA minimizes this year's tax. Your investment manager maximizes risk-adjusted return. Your attorney protects the estate. Each is doing exactly what you hired them to do, and the three answers can quietly contradict each other.
The tax-efficient move for April can be the wrong move for a sale in three years. The portfolio that looks right on paper can sit in the wrong account type. The trust drafted a decade ago can undo a beneficiary designation nobody's checked since.
Our work is to hold all of it at once, find the contradictions, and put a sequence to the decisions. We don't replace your CPA or your attorney. We get them in the same conversation.
What that looks like in practice
- A complete picture of every account, entity, and beneficiary, assembled, reconciled, and kept current
- A multi-year tax projection instead of a single-year return
- Recommendations ranked by what they're worth, not by what's easiest to sell
- A standing review schedule, so nothing waits for a crisis to get looked at
How we work
What we commit to
- Education firstWe keep explaining until you could describe the recommendation to your spouse without notes.
- Show the mathAssumptions get written down, and if you want one changed we will rerun it while you watch.
- Name the costFees, commissions, and how we're paid on any given recommendation, asked or not.
- No pressureWe will tell you when something is genuinely time-sensitive. Most decisions can wait a week without any harm done.
- Our name is on itA licensed person is accountable for every recommendation, by name, and stays accountable for it afterward.
The engagement
The first ninety days
Thirty minutes
What's prompting the call, what you already have in place, and whether we're the right people. No documents needed.
Gathering
Statements, returns, entity documents, policies, estate paperwork. We do the collating; you do the forwarding.
Building the picture
We map what you have, project it forward, and identify where the pieces work against each other.
The plan
Recommendations, the reasoning, the cost, and a sequence. You decide what to implement and when.
The work that happens between meetings
Plenty of software will build you a financial plan now, and some of it is decent. Producing the document was never the difficult part of this work.
The hard part is the call in a bad March, when the plan says hold and every instinct says otherwise. It's the follow-up question that gets an honest answer out of someone who'd rather not give one. It's whether the election actually gets filed in October, or whether it quietly slips a year.
None of that fits in a deliverable. It builds up over years between people who know each other well enough to be blunt, and it is a large part of what you are actually paying for. It is also why we would rather you meet us in a room first.
Who we're built for
We work best with people whose finances have gotten complicated enough that the pieces have stopped talking to each other:
- Business owners. The company is is most of the net worth. The work starts with the tax bill you pay every year, and keeps one eye on the structure that will decide what you keep whenever you sell
- Physicians and dentists. High income, a late start on saving, practice ownership questions, and a tax bill that grows faster than the plan around it
- Pre-retirees. Five to ten years out, where the sequencing of income, taxes, and distributions decides how long the money lasts
We're based in Hoover, Alabama, and we work with clients across the country. Coordination happens over video, over the phone, and in person when it matters, and our clients' CPAs and attorneys stay their own, wherever they are.
If you're earlier than that, we'll say so and point you somewhere useful. That's a better outcome for both of us than an engagement neither of us needed.
How we work together
Three ways to start
Not everyone needs a full financial plan on day one. Some people need one decision made well. Start with whatever is actually in front of you, and you can always move between them.
Service 01
Product-based services
For a specific need or life event that needs attention now. A new job with a rollover decision. A policy that needs reviewing before renewal. A death or a divorce that changes what has to happen next. You don't need a full engagement to get that handled well.
Typically covers
- Life, disability, and long-term care coverage
- 401(k) and retirement plan rollovers
- Annuity and income product review
- Beneficiary designations and account titling
- Group benefits at open enrollment or a job change
We'll tell you when a product is the right answer and when it isn't. Plenty of these conversations end with "keep what you have."
Solve one thing →Service 02
Financial planning & consulting
The full engagement: every account, every entity, every document, projected forward and stress-tested. Most of what the firm does sits inside it.
It is also involved. Financial planning done properly asks real commitment from both sides, you gathering documents and answering uncomfortable questions, us doing the analysis and defending the conclusions. We'd rather say that up front than discover it three months in.
The plan covers
- Cash flow and what's actually available to deploy
- Multi-year tax projection and the decisions that change it
- Investment strategy, account location, and risk
- Business structure, valuation, and exit planning
- Risk management, including what happens if you can't work
- Estate and legacy, and whether the documents still say what you think
You'll get the recommendations, the reasoning, the cost of implementation, and a sequence. What you act on is your call.
See the process →Service 03
Wealth management
Investment management with a strategy behind it. Investing is the part of this business most burdened by noise. Our job is to take it out: build a portfolio around your goals, your timeline, and your tax situation, then manage it with discipline through the years when discipline is hard.
How we approach it
- The allocation follows what the money is for
- Which assets sit in which account type is a decision, not an accident
- You'll know what you pay us and what you pay the funds
- Rebalanced on a schedule, with tax consequences considered first
- Reviewed against your plan, not a benchmark you don't live on
Investing involves risk, including the possible loss of principal. No strategy assures a profit or protects against loss in a declining market.
Talk portfolios →Let's talk next steps
One conversation, and you'll know whether we're useful.
Thirty minutes. No cost, no pitch. You tell us what's on your mind and we tell you honestly what we see, including when the answer is that you don't need us.