For the professional sending this

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.

A note you can paste into your own email

I came across a plain-language reference on how South Dakota taxes investment and estate decisions, and it lines up with a few things we have discussed. It is free and there is nothing to sign up for.

https://driftwoodwealth.com/atlas/2026/south-dakota/brief/

The firm behind it, Driftwood, coordinates across the CPA, the attorney and the portfolio rather than replacing any of them. If it is useful, they offer a fifteen-minute introduction and it produces no proposal. I would stay involved either way.

Coordination brief · South Dakota

What South Dakota changes about a household's decisions.

No lens reads high or severe in South Dakota. The strongest reading is basis coordination, at moderate, so the work here is maintenance rather than repair.

~$37,000 per $1M of taxable assets each year, illustrative: what tax-aware portfolio management alone is worth in South Dakota. Treat it as the floor. It counts the portfolio only, and leaves the estate, gifting, and residency coordination at zero.

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.

The agenda, and whose desk each item is on

Owner	Matter
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.

What can be answered this week

Ask	The request, and what it needs
estate attorney	Ask how each taxable account is titled today, and what South Dakota 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.

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.

Alec Messino

Founder & Financial Advisor, Driftwood Wealth

Book a 15-minute professional introduction → alec@driftwoodwealth.com The full South Dakota Atlas entry →

Illustrative / hypothetical, not a real track record and not advice. The tax-management impact figure is a hypothetical, after-tax result from the retroactive application of a tax-management model to ~30 years of proxy-spliced market data on a single illustrative path; no client capital was invested, and hypothetical performance does not guarantee future results. Intended for sophisticated investors; it may not be relevant to your situation, and your actual figure depends on your own holdings, basis, and bracket. State tax facts reflect tax year 2025 and can change, confirm with a tax advisor. Driftwood Wealth is the private-wealth practice of Alec Messino. Securities products and advisory services offered through Park Avenue Securities LLC (PAS), member FINRA, SIPC. Alec Messino is a Registered Representative and Financial Advisor of PAS. Driftwood Wealth is not an affiliate or subsidiary of PAS. All figures are illustrative models for educational purposes, not investment, tax, or legal advice, and not a recommendation.

State law reflects 2025 tax-year law; last reviewed 2026-07-07. Nothing here is a statement about any particular household.