Planning · 6 min read
A wealth plan that survives your worst year.
Most plans look great in a spreadsheet. The ones that actually build generational wealth are the ones that hold up when the market, the business, or life doesn't cooperate.
Design for the bad year, not the average one
Wealth is destroyed in a small number of very bad moments. A forced sale in a downturn. A health event with no coverage. A tenant vacancy stacked on rising rates. A business owner without disability insurance suddenly unable to work.
A resilient plan is engineered to make sure none of those moments turn into permanent damage.
Three layers of resilience
1. Protection. Right-sized life, disability, and critical illness coverage — reviewed as your income and obligations change, not left in place from a decade ago.
2. Cash flow. A liquid reserve that can absorb 6–12 months of essential expenses without touching long-term investments or triggering tax.
3. Portfolio design. Assets matched to time horizon, so that the money you might need in the next three years is never at the mercy of a 40% drawdown.
The stress-test conversation
Once a year, we walk through a simple exercise with our clients: what would your plan look like if one specific bad thing happened this year? A 30% market drop. A six-month illness. A business revenue shock. A rental vacancy.
The answers are almost always the same: the areas of the plan that are strong stay strong; the areas that are thin become obvious. Then we fix them.
What resilient plans have in common
- Insurance is a structured asset, not a line item to minimize.
- Liquidity is deliberate — never accidental.
- Tax exposure is planned, not discovered in April.
- The plan is written down and reviewed on a schedule.
Everything else is optimization. This is the foundation.
Talk it through
Stress-test your plan with us.
Book a private strategy call and we'll walk through your plan the way we walk through every client's — with the bad year in mind.