FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS
1. What is a Physician Family Office (PFO) and how does it differ from a traditional Family Office?
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2. Is a Family Office right for me?
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3. Why is a Physician Family Office important for me?
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4. How does a Family Office differ from a traditional Wealth Management Firm?
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5. What are the costs of a Family Office?
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6. What services are provided to physicians and their families?
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7. Who will be managing my family's assets?
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8. What is the Managers' experience?
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9. How can you help me organize my financial life?
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10. Why is a PFO better than what a physician may already be doing for him/herself and his/her family?
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11. Why are you offering this high level of service to physicians and their families?
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12. Is your firm only serving the needs of U.S.-based physicians or physicians based in other countries as well?
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13. Does a physician family need to use all of these services or may they just select what they need?
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14. What are the requirements for a physician family to join The Abernathy Group II's (TAG II’s) Physician Family Office?
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15. Why would today’s changing healthcare landscape contribute to the need for these services?
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1. What is a Physician Family Office (PFO) and how does it differ from a traditional Family Office?
The Physician Family Office combines Asset Management, Asset Protection, Estate Planning, Financial Planning, and many aspects of Practice Management along with other Lifestyle-oriented services. Normally, unaffiliated experts would be retained to advise you in each of these areas. Unfortunately, their separate strategies would not be coordinated. Because of this lack of coordination, their recommendations may actually conflict with each other in helping you achieve your financial goals.
Our Physician Family Office offers a team approach. Our portfolio managers, tax attorneys, accountants, and other experts act in concert to develop a single overarching strategy for your wealth management goals, and then coordinate their efforts on your behalf to maximize the strategy’s effectiveness.
Unlike traditional Family Offices, we exclusively serve the unique needs of medical doctors. With over 30 years of servicing this community, we understand that physicians often have little time to dedicate to better managing their practice, let alone their financial affairs and estate planning. Further, doctors must constantly protect their assets from the risks of litigation due to their daily professional activities. In addition to our traditional Family Office services, we help physicians with all aspects of their professional lives from Practice Valuation and Integration, to Practice Management and Marketing.
Top2. Is a Family Office right for me?
If you are a high net worth and successful physician, there may be more you can do to better protect and invest your family’s hard earned assets. CLICK HERE to determine whether our Physician Family Office may be able to help.
3. Why is a Physician Family Office important for me?
Our Physician Family Office is a shelter for your family’s hard-earned assets. Our team of advisors offers unbiased advice, free from conflicts of interest, selling pressure, half-truths, and inflated promises. We don’t sell any products, and we focus on just one type of client: physicians—because we believe the physician’s financial needs are unique. With our deep understanding of those needs, we help high net worth physicians manage their family’s wealth across generations.
For physicians who want to spend less time on business and finance, and more time with their families and their patients, the Physician Family Office offers a comprehensive, private, secure partnership few firms can match.
4. How does a Family Office differ from a traditional Wealth Management Firm?
Our Physician Family Office does not sell any products, nor do we charge any commissions. We work directly for you. You can think of us as your family’s private Chief Financial Officer (CFO). We make recommendations and perform analysis that is in the best interest of you and your family; not based on how much money we stand to profit from our clients executing our recommendations.
Traditional wealth management firms are intrinsically full of conflicts of interest. It all comes down to suitability versus fiduciary. Most brokers, wealth advisors, and insurance salespeople are no more than product salespeople pretending to be looking after your best interests. In fact, what they are really looking to do is to sell you products with high commissions, or make investing recommendations to churn your account. These “advisors” are only obligated to provide you with advice that is suitable rather than advice that is truly in your best interest. At the Physician Family Office you will never have to worry about such conflicts of interest because we have structured our firm so that we aren’t paid any differently whether or not you accept or reject our recommendations. We’re the CFO while you’re the CEO.
5. What are the costs of a Family Office?
The Physician Family Office charges a fraction of 1% as an annual management fee for overseeing your family’s assets, with a minimum account size of $2 Million. This includes dozens of services including Asset Management, Financial Planning, Accounting and Tax, Asset Protection, Estate Planning, Practice Management, Banking, Real Estate, and Concierge. Compare that to the 1-2% you are likely paying your brokerage firm to receive a small fraction of these services from an advisor who is not a professional investor and who is likely trying to sell you products that aren’t in your family’s best interests.
6. What services are provided to physicians and their families?
The Physician Family Office combines Asset Management, Asset Protection, Estate Planning, Financial Planning, Practice Management, and Lifestyle Management, along with many other services.
Normally, unaffiliated experts would be retained to advise you in each of these areas. Unfortunately, their separate strategies would not be coordinated. Because of this lack of coordination, their recommendations may actually conflict with each other in helping you achieve your financial goals.
Our Physician Family Office offers a comprehensive team approach. Our portfolio managers, tax attorneys, accountants, and other experts act in concert to develop a single overarching strategy for your wealth management goals, and then coordinate their efforts on your behalf to maximize the strategy’s effectiveness.
7. Who will be managing my families assets?
A team of advisors led by Steven Abernathy and Brian Luster will be overseeing your family’s assets. Other advisors may include asset managers, analysts, attorneys, financial planners, estate planners, accountants, practice managers, practice valuation specialists, and insurance experts, depending upon your family’s unique needs.
8. What is the Managers' experience?
Since the late 1980s, The Abernathy Group II has been managing the assets of physicians and their families. During this time we have managed individual accounts, retirement accounts, Trust accounts, Limited Partnerships such as hedge funds, private equity investments, and Physician Family Office accounts. We have published extensively on the topics of investing, asset protection, risk management, and the financial services industry, and have achieved numerous accolades from third party sources. We even trademarked an investment process called Collaborative Investing™ – whereby we only accept as co-investors in our hedge fund those doctors who are experts in the areas in which we invest (healthcare).
Learn more about Steven Abernathy and Brain Luster
Learn more about articles we have published
Learn more about awards and accolades we have achieved
9. How can you help me organize my financial life?
The first step in joining our Physician Family Office is for us to build your family a Balance Sheet. This comprehensive list includes every single asset your family owns (from your individual accounts to your real estate holdings, and everything in between) and every liability your family owes, enabling you to understand your family’s Net Worth at all times, and therefore make better financial decisions. We build this for you in the form of a secure and private family website, which will update your account balances daily, so that you no longer need to worry about collecting statements in the mail or remembering the usernames and passwords for dozens of financial websites.
Your website will track your investment progress against your family’s goals and objectives so that you will understand if you are on track to fund your child’s education, or your upcoming retirement, and alert you if there needs to be any changes made to your portfolio.
We will also help you understand the implications of unexpected events and your resiliency to them, such as an early death or disability, a bear market, or a period of high inflation.
In addition, we create an electronic vault for your family, where you can store important documents such as wills, trusts, partnership agreements, and tax returns. This level of organization will help you make better decisions, and can give you peace of mind knowing that if you or your spouse are stricken by a medical emergency, your heirs will know where your assets and important documents can be found.
10. Why is a PFO better than what a physician may already be doing for him/herself and his/her family?
Chances are you have a series of advisors working for you, but not in concert with one another. They most likely include an accountant, an estate planning attorney, several investment advisors, and an insurance salesperson. Some of these advisors may be working in your best interest while others are looking to generate commissions or fees for themselves. But it is unlikely that all are aware of what one another is doing and therefore, they are probably not making recommendations that fit together and support an overall strategy. Because of this lack of coordination, their recommendations may actually conflict with each other in helping you achieve your financial goals.
Our Physician Family Office offers a team approach which will be led by your family’s assigned Relationship Manager who will be responsible for communicating with you and coordinating all of your services. Our portfolio managers, tax attorneys, accountants, and other experts act in concert to develop a single overarching strategy for your wealth management goals, and then coordinate their efforts on your behalf to maximize the strategy’s effectiveness.
11. Why are you offering this high level of service to physicians and their families?
Having managed physicians’ assets since the late 1980s, we have seen our physicians and their families preyed upon time and again by unscrupulous brokers, insurance salespeople, and financial advisors, looking to sell them unfit products in order to generate commissions and fees.
We have been lecturing our physicians for years on these tactics, but realize that the problem is endemic to the fact that most physicians barely have enough time to practice medicine, manage their practice, and spend time with their families. If they don't even have time for the "basics", how can they find the time to manage their finances, perform due diligence on their advisors, and educate themselves on these topics? In addition, medical schools across this country do doctors a disservice by failing to provide them with even a rudimentary finance-related course.
It became more apparent to us that our physicians needed to start treating their financial affairs as if they were CEO of a corporation, and we created our PFO to bridge the gap between need and lack of time and expertise.
We hope that this will be one small step in giving back to the medical community, which has given so much to us all through their art and personal sacrifices, in order to become our society’s healers. It is our goal to help guard this community against those looking to take advantage of them, and make sure they can achieve the financial security and retirement they deserve.
12. Is your firm only serving the needs of U.S.-based physicians or physicians based in other countries as well?
The Abernathy Group II’s approach to financial services has always been global in perspective, as we are capable of servicing the needs of both U.S. and non-U.S.-based physicians and their families. In fact, most of our Family Office members in the U.S. request that we get on an airplane in order to visit them.
13. Does a physician family need to use all of these services or may they just select what they need?
The Abernathy Group II realizes that some physician families will need all of our services and others may only need a few. We consider the depth and breadth of our service offerings to be a menu from which physician families may choose exactly what it is that they need. We also understand that, over time, a physician family’s needs will likely change and different services may become necessary.
14. What are the requirements for a physician family to join TAG II’s Physician Family Office?
We currently serve physicians with a minimum account size of $2 Million, as many of the services we offer would not be practical or applicable to less affluent physicians. However, it is our goal to educate younger physicians, and we are currently writing a book in collaboration with a retired successful medical doctor on this topic. We hope such a text will one day become part of medical school curriculums so that younger doctors can avoid financial mistakes early on in their careers.
15. Why would today’s changing healthcare landscape contribute to the need for these services?
There is a good deal of belief that younger doctors today do not make as much money as their fathers and mothers may have made as doctors a generation or two ago. This is, in part, due to increases in liability insurance, the current cost of a medical education, and limits on payments from Medicare and Medicaid. Recent U.S. healthcare reform will only further decrease a doctor’s ability to generate income and invest; making TAG II’s services entirely more valuable. In fact, we believe that it may be possible for us to save many of our physician families 1-2% of their assets each year in unnecessary fees, expenses, and perhaps even more, by avoiding inappropriate investments.
