Coordination is not a posture. It leaves documents: dated, reasoned, connected to each other. What follows is one household's operating record, reproduced as its own pages produce it. A composite household; the figures illustrative, the mechanics real and current.
The Harris household. Two principals in their late fifties, one operating company they still run, roughly $8 million in investable assets, residency and revenue split across Illinois and Texas, three adult children, and a charitable intention they have talked about for a decade but never structured.
A composite. No such family exists. The tensions are real because they recur. Every page that follows says "the Harrises" and assumes you have met them here.
There is one living list. The Constitution, the allocation policy, the memos, the transition plan, the decision log are not separate documents so much as dated views onto it.
Each entry is an open matter, carried with a status, an owner, and its dependency, until it resolves and is dated. This is the list a coordinated household actually works. Dollar figures are the household's own, modeled; the mechanics beneath them are current law and cited research.
Residency and domicile. Illinois taxes the estate above $4M with no portable spousal exemption; a Texas domicile owes $0.
Asset location. High-yield, tax-inefficient holdings (REITs, taxable bonds, active funds) moved into sheltered structures, while tax-efficient equities stay in taxable accounts to preserve loss harvesting and the step-up.
Hidden fund tax drag. Non-tax-managed funds surrender ~1.90% a year to taxes vs ~0.70% for ETFs, on a $2M taxable sleeve.
A charitable remainder structure for the concentrated position, sequenced with the business sale rather than after it.
Long-term gains harvested at a 0% federal rate in the low-income years before Social Security, resetting basis for free.
Coordinated annual gifting moves wealth out of the estate tax-free, with no cap on recipients, for a gift-splitting couple.
Sequencing the Roth conversion under the IRMAA line. One dollar over $212,000 of joint income bumps a full Medicare tier.
Every figure above has a shadow: the same mechanic, left unattended. These are not opinions. They are thresholds already written into law and studies already published.
One dollar over the joint-income line bumps a Medicare couple a full IRMAA tier, triggered by a return they filed two years earlier.
Cited 2025 CMS Part B & D schedule.
Left to their own timing, investors earned 7.0% while their own funds returned 8.2%, giving up about 15% of everything the funds earned.
Cited Morningstar, Mind the Gap 2025.
In 2024 more than 80% of US stock mutual funds handed shareholders a taxable gain they never asked for, against about 5% of equity ETFs.
Cited Morningstar distribution data, 2024.
Two archetypes stand in for the binder. The Constitution is what the household decided once and holds to. The Decision Register is what it decides as life moves, each entry dated, reasoned, and marked for whether it can still be undone.
Article VIITax is a coordination problem before it is an investment problem.
What the article prevents: a tax move made in one seat that quietly reshapes the estate in another. No decision is scored on its own return; it is scored on what the whole household keeps.
The Review does not chase a return. It re-reads every open matter, re-tests the plan against current law, and documents the one or two decisions that move the most. This year, for the Harrises, one variable moved more than the portfolio did: which state they call home.
The Review does not assert an answer. It documents the defensible split, the days-count evidence, and the second-order effects on the charitable timing, so the decision is made on the record, not in the moment.
The same $395,000 can be explored, state by state, in the Tax Atlas →
None of these pages was written for a website. Each is an output of the same process, kept between reviews and re-worked once a year. This is what a Coordination Review produces.
Request a Coordination Review →Federal estate & gift exemption $15M / $30M, 2026, OBBBA P.L. 119-21, IRS. · Annual gift exclusion $19k / $38k, 2025-26, IRS. · Illinois estate tax $4M non-portable, ~29% first-dollar, 35 ILCS 405. · Texas $0 income & estate; 2025 Proposition 8. · IRMAA 2025 CMS Part B & D schedule. · 0% LTCG ceiling $96,700 MFJ, 2025, IRS. · Portability / step-up IRC 2010(c), 1014. · Advisor value Vanguard Advisor's Alpha 2025; Morningstar Mind the Gap 2025 & tax-cost data.
$395,000 vs $0 Illinois-vs-Texas estate result on a modeled ~$5.5M estate. · ≈ $24,000/yr fund tax drag applied to a $2M taxable sleeve. · $220,000 charitable-structure opportunity. · ~$30,000/yr the 3% translated onto $1M. · Every Harris register row. Hypothetical, for illustration; not an actual client result, and not a promise of future outcomes. Figures reflect current law, which is subject to change, and suitability that is specific to each household.