This page is written to be forwarded as it stands. Nothing on it asks your client for information, and Driftwood is not introduced as a replacement for you.
One of the five lenses reads high or severe in Kentucky: mobility value.
Illustrative and hypothetical, not a track record: a tax-management model applied retroactively to roughly 30 years of proxy-spliced market data on a single path, with no client capital invested. A household's own figure depends on its holdings, basis, and bracket. Full disclosure below.
| Owner | Matter |
|---|---|
| advisor + CPA | Residency & domicile Whether, and how, a change of domicile is worth pursuing, and the facts (days, home, ties) that make it real rather than nominal. |
| estate attorney | Asset titling for step-up Titling assets to capture the fullest basis step-up the marital-property regime allows at the first death. |
| advisor + CPA | Loss harvesting Setting a harvesting cadence that captures the state rate a banked loss offsets, sequenced against the state's loss-carryforward rules. |
| advisor | Asset location Placing the high-turnover sleeve in tax-advantaged accounts so the state's rate falls on the least of the household's realized gains. |
| Ask | The request, and what it needs |
|---|---|
| advisor | Ask for this year's after-tax result on the current holdings in Kentucky, set beside the same holdings in a no-income-tax state, and for the list of facts a state examines when it tests domicile. Both are inputs to a decision rather than the decision.Bring: Last year's full return, and a current statement for each account. |
| estate attorney | Ask how each taxable account is titled today, and what Kentucky law does to basis at a first death for that form of ownership. Titling is recorded on custodial paperwork, so this is a document check rather than an opinion.Bring: The registration page of each taxable account. |
| advisor | Ask when losses were last harvested in the taxable book, and what loss carryforward is on file. Kentucky taxes long-term gains at a top effective 4%, which is the figure that answer has to be read against.Bring: This year's realized gain and loss report, and last year's Schedule D. |
| advisor | Ask which holdings sit in taxable accounts and which sit in tax-deferred ones today, and what turnover each produces. Placement cannot be assessed until both lists are on one page, including the accounts nobody currently manages.Bring: A position list for every account, including the ones held elsewhere. |
Where Driftwood sits. Driftwood is the coordination seat. It does not file returns, draft or amend documents, or offer a second opinion on the work of the professionals a household already has. It makes that work coordinate with everything else.
You are a permanent seat, not a relationship being routed around. Your engagement, and your client relationship, remain yours. Driftwood does not pay or receive compensation for professional referrals.