By Wednesday, most of our clients will have filed or extended. If that’s where your tax planning ended this year, there are likely opportunities you haven’t captured.

Here’s the question we’d ask any high-net-worth family right now: when was the last time someone actually ran the numbers on your estate plan, your gifting strategy, or your Roth conversion window? The rules changed last year. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act permanently raised the federal estate and gift tax exemption to roughly $15 million per person — $30 million per couple — made the 20% QBI deduction permanent, and lifted the SALT cap to $40,400 for 2026, with a phase-out starting at $500,000 of MAGI. The Fed is holding rates at 3.5%–3.75%, with maybe one cut this year. Every one of those numbers changes a decision you’re already making — or quietly avoiding.

Planning for HNW families isn’t a once-a-year event. It’s a running conversation about gifting, trusts, entity design, cash flow, and the tax drag on your portfolio — the stuff that actually moves the needle on after-tax wealth.

We’d rather have that conversation in April than watch you scramble in December. Give us a call.

For informational and educational purposes only. Not investment, tax, or legal advice. Lake Hills Wealth Management is a Registered Investment Advisor registered with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Registration as an investment adviser does not imply a certain level of skill or training. Our current Form ADV, Part 2A is available at adviserinfo.sec.gov.

After five straight weeks of losses, the S&P 500 posted its best week since November — up 3.4% in a holiday-shortened stretch. Friday’s jobs report came in stronger than expected at 178,000 new positions, and unemployment ticked down to 4.3%. Meanwhile, Powell told a Harvard audience that rates are in a “good place” and took rate hikes off the table, even with oil prices elevated. Treasury yields dropped 10 basis points almost immediately.

Good news. But here’s what matters more to us: our risk-off signals haven’t triggered. That tells us this pullback, while uncomfortable, isn’t signaling something deeper. We don’t see a recession this year. The economy is bending, not breaking. And if our signals do change, we’ll act on them — regardless of what we think the market will do.

What we’re watching closely is liquidity. It’s taken a real hit over the past month, and liquidity is what drives risk assets — stocks, credit, all of it. When liquidity dries up, markets get choppy. That’s exactly what we’ve been living through. But the highest-probability scenario, in our view, is that markets find a floor somewhere around May or June and move higher from there. We believe the same holds for precious metals. Don’t hold us to the exact timing — but the direction is what counts.

Weeks like this can be uncomfortable, but having a proven process helps.

If you want to talk through how your portfolio is positioned, give us a call.

For informational and educational purposes only. Not investment, tax, or legal advice. Lake Hills Wealth Management is a Registered Investment Advisor registered with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Registration as an investment adviser does not imply a certain level of skill or training. Our current Form ADV, Part 2A is available at adviserinfo.sec.gov.

Congress raised the federal estate tax exemption to $15 million per person — $30 million for married couples — starting January 1, 2026. It’s permanent, indexed for inflation, and it’s the most generous transfer-tax environment we’ve seen in decades. If your estate plan hasn’t been updated since the One Big Beautiful Bill Act passed last summer, there’s a good chance it no longer reflects reality.

Many families built their plans around the old exemption levels and the assumption that the TCJA numbers would sunset. That didn’t happen — Congress went bigger. Trusts funded based on prior thresholds may now be over-allocated or structured in ways that no longer make sense. Funding formulas, powers of appointment, and beneficiary designations all deserve a fresh look.

For families well above the exemption, this is a window to move aggressively on lifetime gifting. You can transfer significant wealth into irrevocable trusts — spousal lifetime access trusts, dynasty trusts, grantor retained annuity trusts — and lock in today’s values while removing future appreciation from your taxable estate. Combine that with the $19,000 annual exclusion per recipient, and the math gets compelling fast.

One thing we’d flag: state estate taxes haven’t kept pace. New York, Illinois, Washington state, and several others still tax estates well below the federal threshold. A couple worth $25 million may owe zero federally but face a seven-figure state bill. That’s a planning gap worth closing.

If your estate documents haven’t been reviewed since last summer, let’s get that on the calendar. Give us a call.

For informational and educational purposes only. Not investment, tax, or legal advice. Lake Hills Wealth Management is a Registered Investment Advisor registered with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Registration as an investment adviser does not imply a certain level of skill or training. Our current Form ADV, Part 2A is available at adviserinfo.sec.gov.

Starting July 4, the new Trump Account lets parents and grandparents contribute up to $5,000 a year into a tax-deferred investment account for any child under 18. The money goes into a low-fee U.S. stock index fund — no bonds, no individual picks — and stays locked until the child turns 18, when the account converts to a traditional IRA. Children born between 2025 and 2028 also get a one-time $1,000 from the federal government.

If you own a business, there’s an angle worth paying attention to. Employers can contribute up to $2,500 per employee per year — total, not per child — toward their children’s Trump Accounts, and that contribution is a deductible business expense that’s excluded from the employee’s income. It’s a real benefit you can offer your team, and it works for your own kids too. The employer contribution counts toward the $5,000 annual cap, but the tax treatment makes it more efficient than personal contributions dollar-for-dollar.

Here’s where it gets tricky for wealthier families. Personal contributions to a Trump Account don’t qualify for the annual gift tax exclusion — currently $19,000 per donor, per recipient. Because the child can’t touch the money until 18, the IRS treats these as gifts of future interest. That means a Form 709 gift tax return for every year you contribute, even if it’s just $1,000 from Grandma. Congress may issue a technical correction — the same way they did for 529 plans — but until that happens, this is the rule.

We’d rather our clients plan around that wrinkle now than discover it at tax time. If you have kids or grandchildren and want to understand how Trump Accounts fit alongside your 529s, custodial accounts, and broader gifting strategy, give us a call.

For informational and educational purposes only. Not investment, tax, or legal advice. Lake Hills Wealth Management is a Registered Investment Advisor registered with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Registration as an investment adviser does not imply a certain level of skill or training. Our current Form ADV, Part 2A is available at adviserinfo.sec.gov.

The Fed meets Tuesday and Wednesday, with its decision dropping at 1 PM CST on March 18. Nobody expects a rate cut — market odds are near zero. But this meeting matters more than the headline number suggests.

Here’s why: it’s the first meeting where the Fed publishes updated economic projections and a new dot plot. We’ll see in black and white how Fed members are pricing in Iran, surging oil prices, and the tariff environment. With Powell’s term ending in May and a new Chair coming, the dots could shift more than markets expect. That’s the real story this week.

For clients still heavy in cash and money markets, the question isn’t “will they cut rates?” — it’s “how long can we keep waiting?” Cash yields real money today, but that window is narrowing. If the dot plot signals two or more cuts ahead, we’d rather be extending duration now than scrambling later.

The recent equity pullback — which briefly erased all 2026 gains — is a reminder that volatility never goes away, it just goes quiet for a while. Portfolios built around quality fixed income and real assets are better positioned for what’s ahead than ones anchored to short-term cash.

If you want to talk through your positioning before Wednesday’s announcement, give us a call.

For informational and educational purposes only. Not investment, tax, or legal advice. Lake Hills Wealth Management is a Registered Investment Advisor registered with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Registration as an investment adviser does not imply a certain level of skill or training. Our current Form ADV, Part 2A is available at adviserinfo.sec.gov.

The headlines have been loud lately. Tariffs, rate uncertainty, geopolitical noise — take your pick. And every time volatility picks up, we get the same question from clients: Should we do something?

The honest answer is: it depends on whether your portfolio is built for this or just hoping to get through it.

At Lake Hills, we run what we call an Adaptive Investment Strategy. The short version: we don’t just ride markets up and down and tell you it’ll be fine in 20 years. We have a systematic circuit breaker — a predetermined level where we reduce equity exposure and move to safety. No emotion, no guessing. When the signal trips, we act. When conditions recover, we re-engage.

Most people don’t have that. They have a target allocation and a hope. And when a real drawdown hits, hope is a terrible risk management strategy.

If you’re not sure how your portfolio would respond to a 30% decline — not just on paper, but in terms of how it would actually affect your retirement timeline — that’s worth a conversation.

Markets will do what markets do. Your job is to make sure your plan doesn’t depend on them behaving.

For informational and educational purposes only. Not investment, tax, or legal advice. Lake Hills Wealth Management is a Registered Investment Advisor registered with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Registration as an investment adviser does not imply a certain level of skill or training. Our current Form ADV, Part 2A is available at adviserinfo.sec.gov.

Tax season isn’t just about filing. It’s the best time of year to figure out what went wrong — and what you can still fix before it happens again next year.

If you’re a high earner, a business owner, or someone sitting on concentrated equity, the tax code is either working for you or against you. There’s rarely a middle ground.

A few things worth reviewing right now:

Roth conversion opportunities. If your income was lower in 2025 than you expect it to be going forward, there may be a window to convert IRA dollars to Roth at a lower rate. That window closes once your income climbs.

Capital gain timing. Did you take gains last year that could have been harvested differently? Are there positions with embedded losses you’ve been holding onto that could offset future gains? This is the kind of coordination that compound over time.

Business owner deductions. If you own a business and you’re not maximizing a defined benefit plan, SEP IRA, or Solo 401(k), you’re leaving real money on the table — dollars that could be invested for your retirement instead of sent to the IRS.

We work closely with your CPA to make sure the investment strategy and the tax strategy are actually talking to each other. If they’re not, you’re probably paying more than you should.

April 15th comes every year. How prepared you are for it is a choice.

For informational and educational purposes only. Not investment, tax, or legal advice. Lake Hills Wealth Management is a Registered Investment Advisor registered with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Registration as an investment adviser does not imply a certain level of skill or training. Our current Form ADV, Part 2A is available at adviserinfo.sec.gov.

Everyone asks about the number — how much do I need to retire? But there’s another number that matters just as much, and almost nobody calculates it correctly: how much can I actually spend each year without running out?

The 4% rule gets thrown around a lot. Take 4% of your portfolio each year and you’ll be fine for 30 years. It’s a useful starting point, but it was built on historical data that may not reflect what the next 30 years looks like — especially with sequence-of-returns risk in the early years of retirement.

Here’s what we actually focus on with clients:

Your withdrawal rate matters less than when you’re withdrawing. A 20% market decline in year two of retirement is dramatically more damaging than the same decline in year 15. That’s not intuitive, but it’s math.

This is exactly why having a circuit breaker in your investment strategy isn’t just about protecting against drawdowns — it’s about protecting the sustainability of your income. When we reduce equity exposure in a downturn, we’re not just managing volatility. We’re preserving the portfolio’s ability to keep paying you.

If you’re within 10 years of retirement and you haven’t stress-tested your withdrawal plan against a bad early sequence, that’s worth doing now. Not when the market is down 30%.

For informational and educational purposes only. Not investment, tax, or legal advice. Lake Hills Wealth Management is a Registered Investment Advisor registered with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Registration as an investment adviser does not imply a certain level of skill or training. Our current Form ADV, Part 2A is available at adviserinfo.sec.gov.

We work with a lot of business owners. And the most common mistake we see isn’t a bad investment decision — it’s a structural one.

The business is the retirement plan. Everything flows back into it. The owner takes a modest salary, reinvests the profits, and assumes that when it comes time to sell, the proceeds will be enough.

Sometimes that works out. But it’s a concentrated bet — one asset, one buyer, one market at one point in time. And it means that the owner’s personal financial security is completely tied to a transaction they can’t fully control.

What we help business owners build instead is a parallel track: a personal wealth base that grows independently of the business. Maxing out retirement vehicles, managing compensation strategically, building a taxable investment account — all of it designed so that by the time a liquidity event happens, it’s a windfall, not a lifeline.

The business sale becomes an accelerant, not the foundation.

If you’re a business owner and your personal net worth outside the business is thin, that’s worth addressing now — not when you’re 60 and trying to negotiate an exit.

For informational and educational purposes only. Not investment, tax, or legal advice. Lake Hills Wealth Management is a Registered Investment Advisor registered with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Registration as an investment adviser does not imply a certain level of skill or training. Our current Form ADV, Part 2A is available at adviserinfo.sec.gov.

East Texas families with mineral rights and royalty income have a planning situation that most wealth advisors aren’t equipped to handle — and many don’t even try.

Royalty income is inconsistent by nature. Production fluctuates. Prices move. Lease terms vary. And the tax treatment — with depletion allowances, intangible drilling costs, and the potential for like-kind exchanges — is genuinely complex. Most advisors just report the income and move on.

We think about it differently.

Royalty income, when it’s managed well, can be a significant accelerant for building permanent wealth. But that requires treating it as a planning input — not just a tax line item. Questions worth asking:

Are you reinvesting royalty income strategically, or is it just flowing into a savings account?

How does your mineral estate fit into your estate plan? The transfer of mineral rights across generations has its own set of considerations — title complexity, ownership structures, valuation — that require coordinated planning between your advisor, CPA, and attorney.

If there’s a lease bonus or significant production event, is your investment strategy prepared for a large, lump-sum inflow? Tax-smart deployment of that capital matters.

We’re based in Austin with deep ties to East Texas, and we’ve built our planning around the clients who actually live and work here. If you’re sitting on mineral assets and haven’t had a real planning conversation about them, we’d like to have it.

For informational and educational purposes only. Not investment, tax, or legal advice. Lake Hills Wealth Management is a Registered Investment Advisor registered with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Registration as an investment adviser does not imply a certain level of skill or training. Our current Form ADV, Part 2A is available at adviserinfo.sec.gov.