Your Financial Life Shouldn't Feel Hard to Keep Track of
Redwood Family Office helps business owners, real estate investors, and high-income families find where money is being lost, organize the moving pieces of their financial lives, and make sure important work actually gets finished.
What We Do
Financial Organization
One organized system for accounts, entities, properties, insurance, estate documents, professional contacts, & important dates. Built once & maintained continuously.
Tax Oversight & Planning
Review of returns, compensation, estimated payments, deductions, entity activity, & upcoming transactions while there's still time to make decisions. The work happens during the year not after.
Money-Leak Reviews
A systematic search for unnecessary fees, excess interest, duplicate services, overlooked deductions, & recurring expenses that may no longer be serving you.
Business & Real Estate Performance Reviews
A clearer look at which businesses and properties are producing usable cash, which are consuming it, & what may be affecting the result.
Implementation Management
Recommendations are turned into assigned tasks with owners, deadlines, & documented follow-up. Instead of leaving you with a list of things to do, we help make sure the work gets completed.
What is a Virtual Family Office?
For generations, very wealthy families solved a common problem by putting their financial professionals under one roof.
Tax professionals, attorneys, investment professionals, controllers, and other specialists could see the same financial picture and coordinate their work.
That level of infrastructure can cost millions of dollars a year.
A virtual family office brings the same basic idea to families who do not need — or want — an entire private staff.
One professional sits at the center of your financial life, sees the broader picture, and coordinates with the specialists you already work with.
You get greater oversight and coordination without building your own family office.
And you do not need nine figures of wealth to benefit from it.
You simply need enough financial complexity that it has become difficult for any one professional to see everything at once.
For Example:
- Two businesses
- Four rental properties
- A spouse with income
- A trust drafted in 2015 that was never funded
- Three retirement accounts at three custodians
- An accountant who primarily sees your tax information once a year
At a certain point, the problem is no longer whether you have good professionals.
The problem is whether anyone is seeing the whole picture.
The Problem is Rarely Bad Advice.
It is That Nobody Sees the Whole Picture.
- Your accountant sees last year's return.
- Your bookkeeper sees the transactions.
- Your investment advisor sees the brokerage account.
- Your attorney saw you once, in 2019.
Every one of them is competent inside their lane. None of them is looking across all of it, and the money is lost in the space between them:
- A distribution taken in the wrong month.
- An entity that stopped fitting the business two years ago.
- A property that has been running at a loss nobody has actually calculated.
- A strategy everyone agreed was smart that no one was assigned to finish.
By the time a problem surfaces on a tax return, the year is closed
and the decision is permanent.
We Help You with Two Outcomes
01
Stop Losing Money Unnecessarily.
Money can quietly leave your financial life in ways that are difficult to notice when nobody is looking across the entire picture.
That may include:
- Avoidable taxes
- Interest that may be able to be restructured
- Duplicate services across businesses or entities
- Account and platform fees that have not been reviewed in years
- Deductions missed because supporting documentation never reached the person preparing the return
- Subscriptions and vendor agreements that continue renewing automatically
Individually, some of these may look small.
Together — and over several years — they can become expensive.
Our job is to find them, quantify them, and determine what needs to happen next.
02
Get your financial life organized — and keep it organized.
Instead of important information living across emails, filing cabinets, computers, portals, and different professional offices, you have one organized system.
- Your entities.
- Your properties.
- Your accounts.
- Your insurance policies.
- Your estate documents.
- Your professional contacts.
- Your deadlines.
You know what you own, what you owe, what needs attention next, and who is responsible for handling it.
You know what you own, what you owe, what needs attention next, and who is responsible for handling it.
And if your spouse or another trusted person ever needs that information, they can find it too.
We Sell No Products
Redwood Family Office does not manage investments, sell insurance, or earn commissions. There is one fee, and clients know what it is before they hire us.
When a firm's income depends on which product you buy, the advice bends toward the product. Ours cannot, since there is no product. The only thing we are paid to do is find money you are losing and get the work finished.
Who This Is For
Redwood Family Office is designed for people whose financial lives have become more complex than a once-a-year tax conversation can reasonably address.
Redwood may be a fit if you:
- Earn $250,000 or more
- Own a business, real estate, or both
- Have several companies or entities
- Own multiple propertie
- Have numerous financial accounts
- Work with several professionals who rarely communicate with one another
- Feel that too much money is going out the door without anyone looking closely enough at where it is going
From the outside, your financial life may look successful.
Behind the scenes, you may still feel like too much is scattered, too much depends on you, and nobody has the full picture.
You are willing to let one person see all of it so the pieces can finally be managed together.
Redwood Family Office is probably not the right fit if you are:
- Looking only for the least expensive tax return
- Looking only for bookkeeping
- Searching for one isolated tax strategy with no broader planning
- Looking for a free answer to a complicated financial situation
- Unwilling to provide complete information
- Expecting a guaranteed financial result before the work has been completed
There's nothing wrong with wanting inexpensive tax preparation.
It's an important service, and there are good professionals who provide it.
It's simply not what we do here.
The Relationship
The ongoing family office relationship is
$5,400 per year
It covers continuous oversight of your full financial picture, the organization system and its upkeep, year-round tax review, money-leak reviews, coordination with your other professionals, and management of what needs to get finished.
Tax planning engagements, financial-organization projects, bookkeeping cleanup, and business and property profitability reviews are quoted separately.
Who You'd Be Working With
Cathi Korelin has spent 18 years in tax, across thousands of individual and business returns. She is an Enrolled Agent, federally authorized to represent taxpayers before the IRS. She holds the Certified Tax Strategist designation and is a Fellow of the National Tax Practice Institute. She is a published author on tax, business, and financial subjects.
Eighteen years of returns teaches you where money hides. It also teaches you how often the problem was visible a year earlier, to nobody.
What Others Have Done
A Dental Practice Owner.
Reorganized the business structure, the financial structure, and the personal side of the household, coordinated the changes across all other professionals, and reduced the tax burden by approximately $850,000.
A Janitorial Company.
Identified roughly $10,000
per year in savings, then reorganized the owner's newer company to improve how it ran and what it kept.