About

Most of what I actually think about wealth doesn't fit into a firm's website, a pitch deck, or a product explainer. It's not about which structure is optimal or which account beats which. It's about the moment a family realizes the plan they built five years ago no longer describes who they are. The founder who can't say no to one more deal because saying no would mean admitting the exit already happened. The client who has eight figures and can't get two million dollars in sixty days without a scramble.

Those are the essays here. Not explainers on how a given structure works — this is the part that isn't a product: the decisions, the blind spots, the quiet ways wealth constrains the people who built it.

Before any of this, I spent close to two decades on the other side of the table — corporate banking, running special-situations advisory at Deutsche Bank and Merrill Lynch, then investment banking and later wealth management at UBS. That work was really about one thing: sequencing. Which move you make first, what it locks in, what it quietly forecloses, long before the deal ever closes.

In 2022 I founded IceBridge Financial Group to bring that same discipline to individual families and founders instead of banks and institutions.

Some of what's here started as columns for Forbes; some of it is new. All of it comes from the same place: watching smart, capable people get boxed in by decisions that looked completely reasonable at the time.

If there's a single thread running through this, it's that freedom matters more than size. Not the freedom to buy anything — the freedom to say no to something you don't want, without it costing you more than you're willing to pay. That's a harder thing to build than a big number, and it's the thing most of these essays are actually about.

This is a personal project, updated when I have something worth saying rather than on a schedule. If that's useful to you, the newsletter is the easiest way to keep up.