General Advice Warning: The information on this page is general in nature and does not take into account your personal objectives, financial situation, or needs. You should consider whether the information is appropriate for your circumstances and seek personal advice from a qualified financial adviser before acting.
Family Office and Private Client Advisory
High-net-worth families rarely have a single financial problem. They have overlapping structures, competing priorities, and advice that was built in layers over decades, often without anyone checking whether the layers still fit together.
A family office model brings coordination where there has only been accumulation. It does not replace your accountant, lawyer, or investment manager. It sits above them, ensuring the entire architecture works as a system, not a collection of parts.
Build MyWealth provides private client advisory services for families whose wealth has outgrown single-adviser models. We coordinate across structures, generations, and professional relationships to ensure nothing falls through the gaps.
Build MyWealth holds an Australian Financial Services Licence and provides personal financial advice. We do not provide legal or tax advice. Where legal, accounting, or other specialist input is required, we work alongside your existing advisers or refer to trusted professionals in our network.
The Financial Architecture Gap
Most high-net-worth families have assembled a capable team: an accountant who manages tax, a lawyer who drafted the trust deeds, an investment adviser who runs a portfolio, and an insurance broker who placed the cover years ago. Each professional does their job well in isolation.
The gap is not in any single layer of advice. The gap is between them. Structures interact in ways that individual advisers are not tasked with monitoring. Tax strategies conflict with estate plans. Insurance no longer reflects the asset base. Superannuation and trust structures were set up under prior legislation and never reviewed as a whole.
This is the financial architecture gap, and it is where the most significant wealth erosion occurs for families with complex affairs.
For the technical framework behind wills, trusts, and succession structures, see our estate planning strategy.
For fund-level investment governance and compliance, see our SMSF strategy.
Illustrative Scenario: The Uncoordinated Estate: A family holds $8 million across super, a discretionary trust, a company, and personal assets. The SMSF has a non-lapsing binding death benefit nomination directing proceeds to adult children. The will leaves the residual estate to a testamentary trust for grandchildren. The life insurance is owned inside the SMSF but was sized when the total estate was half its current value. No one has checked whether the BDBN, the will, and the trust deed still align, or whether the tax treatment of death benefits has been considered. The result: a six-figure tax bill that could have been reduced, and a family dispute over what the deceased actually intended.
This scenario is illustrative only and does not represent any actual client. It is intended to demonstrate the type of coordination issues that can arise in complex estates.
Coordinating Across Structures
Wealth that spans multiple structures, including SMSFs, family trusts, corporate entities, investment bonds, and personal holdings, requires someone to hold the full picture. Without a coordinating adviser, each structure operates in its own silo.
Our role as a private client adviser is to map the complete financial architecture and identify where structures overlap, conflict, or leave gaps. We work alongside your existing advisers to ensure:
- Trust distributions align with the family’s tax position across all entities
- Superannuation contributions and drawdowns are timed to complement, not undermine, other strategies
- Insurance cover reflects current asset values and is held in the most tax-effective structure
- Investment allocations are considered holistically, not duplicated across structures
- Estate documents, including wills, BDBNs, trust deeds, and powers of attorney, work together as a system
Illustrative Scenario: Conflicting Advice Streams: A business owner has a personal financial adviser, a corporate accountant, and a lawyer who drafted the shareholder agreement. The accountant recommends maximising franking credits through dividends. The financial adviser has recommended salary sacrifice into super to reduce personal tax. The lawyer structured the buy-sell agreement years ago with an insurance arrangement that no longer matches the business valuation. Each adviser gave sound advice, but the three strategies pull in different directions. Without a coordinating layer, the family ends up paying more tax, holding misaligned insurance, and relying on an outdated succession plan.
This scenario is illustrative only and does not represent any actual client.
Post-Business-Sale Strategy
The sale of a business is often the single largest liquidity event a family will experience. It creates both opportunity and risk. The proceeds need to be deployed across multiple objectives, including retirement funding, next-generation wealth, lifestyle assets, and often philanthropic ambitions, while managing CGT, structuring appropriately, and avoiding lifestyle inflation that erodes the capital base.
Many families find that the advice they needed before the sale is very different from what they need after. The transition from business owner to passive investor requires a fundamentally different financial architecture.
We work with families through this transition, coordinating CGT concessions, superannuation strategies (including the small business CGT cap), trust restructuring, and the deployment of proceeds across a new investment framework designed for the next chapter.
Illustrative Scenario: The Post-Sale Drift: A couple sells their business for $12 million after 25 years. They use the small business CGT concessions to shelter a portion in super and place the remainder in a family trust. Twelve months later, the funds are sitting in cash and term deposits while they “figure out what to do next.” The accountant has lodged the returns. The lawyer has updated the will. But no one has built the investment framework, stress-tested the retirement projection, or considered how Division 296 will interact with the super balances they have just created. The proceeds are safe, but they are not working.
This scenario is illustrative only and does not represent any actual client.
For families with substantial superannuation balances, see our Division 296 planning guide.
Division 296 and High-Balance Superannuation
The Treasury Laws Amendment (Building a Stronger and Fairer Super System) Bill 2026 received Royal Assent on 13 March 2026 (Act No. 8 of 2026). Division 296 imposes an additional 15% tax on earnings attributable to superannuation balances above $3 million, with an additional 10% on balances above $10 million. Both thresholds will be indexed.
For families with significant super balances, particularly those who have recently used small business CGT concessions to contribute large amounts, Division 296 introduces a new layer of complexity that interacts with contribution strategies, pension drawdown timing, and the broader structural allocation between super and non-super entities.
Our private client advisory model ensures Division 296 is not considered in isolation but as part of the full wealth architecture. For detailed analysis, see our Division 296 Tax Strategy page.
Intergenerational Wealth and Governance
Wealth transfer between generations is where the greatest proportion of family wealth is lost, not to markets, but to poor planning, family conflict, and structural misalignment. The statistics are well established: the majority of family wealth does not survive to the third generation.
The cause is rarely a single bad decision. It is the absence of a framework for how wealth is managed, distributed, and governed as families grow. This includes:
- Succession planning for control of trusts, companies, and SMSFs
- Education and engagement of the next generation in financial decision-making
- Governance structures, including family investment committees, distribution policies, and decision-making protocols
- Estate architecture that accounts for blended families, differing capacities, and evolving relationships
We do not impose a governance model. We help families design one that reflects their values, their complexity, and their ambitions for the wealth they have built.
Five-Point Private Wealth Architecture Review
Every private client engagement begins with our Five-Point Private Wealth Architecture Review:
- Structural Mapping: We document every entity, account, policy, and holding across the family group. Who owns what, where it sits, and how it connects.
- Advisory Alignment Audit: We review the advice each professional has given and identify where strategies conflict, overlap, or leave gaps between disciplines.
- Tax and Legislative Exposure: We assess the family’s exposure to current and pending legislative changes, including Division 296, contribution caps, transfer balance cap, and trust taxation proposals.
- Estate and Succession Integrity: We test whether wills, BDBNs, trust deeds, shareholder agreements, and powers of attorney work together. We identify single points of failure.
- Intergenerational Readiness: We evaluate whether the current structures, governance arrangements, and communication practices are adequate for the next transition of wealth or control.
As published in the Australian Financial Review: Wealth transfer and women inheriting wealth | Inheritance traps and family legacy
Why a Boutique Adviser for Private Wealth
Large institutional advice firms are built for scale. They serve thousands of clients with standardised models and product-driven solutions. For families with straightforward needs, that model works well.
For families with complex, multi-entity, multi-generational wealth, the institutional model often falls short. The adviser changes every few years. The advice is constrained by approved product lists. The coordination across structures is limited to what fits the firm’s operating model.
A boutique advisory practice offers what institutional firms cannot: continuity of relationship, depth of knowledge across the full structure, and the ability to coordinate across disciplines without being constrained by a single product shelf or investment platform.
Build MyWealth operates as a boutique private client advisory practice. We maintain a deliberately small client base to ensure every family receives the depth of attention their complexity demands.
Sangram Rana is an IFA Excellence Awards finalist: Risk Adviser of the Year 2022, 2023, and 2025, SMSF Adviser of the Year 2022 and 2023, and Client Outcome of the Year 2022. Published in the Australian Financial Review, Money and Life, SmartCompany, Inside Small Business, Professional Planner, Life Insurance Guide, CommBank Brighter Magazine, and Benefolk. Corporate Authorised Representative, Lifespan Financial Planning AFSL 229892.
Coordinate Your Wealth Architecture
If your wealth has outgrown a single-adviser model, a private client advisory engagement can bring coordination where there has only been accumulation. Book a confidential consultation to discuss your family’s financial architecture.