Wealth Management in Alpharetta, GA
Manage your investments, taxes, and estate as one plan.
Fee-Only • Fiduciary • Independent RIA • CFP®, ChFC® • 30+ Years Serving North Atlanta
Wealth Management Means Seeing How All of It Works Together
As wealth grows, the decisions get more complicated, and each one affects the next. The question underneath tends to be the same: can you help me make informed decisions about growing and protecting what I have built?
Wealth management reaches into most corners of your financial life. The portfolio. The tax bill that follows a change to it. The accounts still sitting with a former employer. The beneficiary designations nobody has looked at since a divorce. What eventually passes to your family, and what it costs them to receive it. Our job is to help you see how each decision fits with the ones around it. Daner Wealth Management has done that work in Alpharetta since 1993.
Who We Work With
Our clients are usually executives, business owners, and professionals in their forties through sixties, along with retirees already drawing income from what they built.
Some are handling equity compensation for the first time and unsure what to do with a vesting schedule. Some are five years out and want to know whether the number actually works. Others have managed their own money well for years, until the tax and estate side grew into more than they wanted to track. Women navigating divorce, widowhood, or an inheritance have been a particular focus of this practice for years.
What We Coordinate
Our work covers five areas:
- Investment Planning is the foundation. We build portfolios around your goals, your time horizon, and the risk your situation can reasonably carry, then manage them through Portfolio Management, Asset Allocation Srategies, and Investment Risk Management. Learn more on our Investment Planning page.
- Retirement Planning is about what your assets can actually support. That includes Retirement Income Planning, how to Maximize Social Security Benefits, Pension Planning where an election is on the table, and RMD Planning once distributions begin. Accounts left with former employers raise 401(k) Rollover and IRA Rollover decisions early. More on our retirement planning page.
- Tax Planning is year-round work. Tax-Efficient Investing shapes which assets sit in which accounts. Tax Loss Harvesting can offset gains in years the portfolio needs rebalancing anyway. Roth Conversions may make sense in lower-income years before required distributions begin. Tax Return Review looks at your filed return for opportunities in the year ahead. We coordinate with your CPA. We do not prepare returns.
- Estate Planning makes sure the plan survives you. Trust and Estate Planning, Legacy Planning, and Charitable Giving Strategies each affect how assets transfer and what your heirs receive. Much of the work here is unglamorous: beneficiary designations not updated since a divorce, accounts titled in a way that defeats the trust, documents that no longer match the family. We work alongside your estate attorney. We do not draft legal documents.
- Financial Planning ties the rest together, including Cash Flow Management, Comprehensive Financial Planning, Executive Compensation Planning for deferred comp and equity awards, and Education Planning for families funding college alongside their own retirement. More on our Financial Planning page.
Private Wealth Management
Some households arrive with more moving parts than a single plan holds neatly. Business interests or multiple entities. Deferred compensation with its own election windows. Property in more than one state. Assets that will pass to a second generation with a tax situation of its own.
Complexity like this means more to track, more coordination with your attorney and your CPA, and more decisions where the tax answer and the investment answer point in different directions. It usually means we are in regular contact with the other professionals in your life, and in some cases with your adult children.
The fiduciary standard and the fee-only structure apply to every client we serve. There is no separate tier and no different standard of care.
Wealth Management for Alpharetta Families
Our office is at 11475 Great Oaks Way, Suite 340, a few minutes from Avalon and close to the Roswell and Johns Creek lines. The Georgia 400 corridor shapes a lot of what we see, from executives managing equity compensation to retirees living on what those careers built. The questions run from how to build wealth to how to draw from it without an unnecessary tax bill.
We meet clients in person in Alpharetta and by video, and we serve families in Roswell, Johns Creek, Milton, Cumming, and across the country.
What to Expect
The first conversation costs nothing and is mostly us listening. You describe your situation and what prompted the call. We tell you honestly whether we are a suitable fit, and sometimes we are not.
When it makes sense to continue, we gather the documents: statements, tax returns, benefit summaries, estate documents. We review all of it and come back with what we see, including the conflicts nobody has flagged before.
You then get a plan covering investment allocation, tax strategy, and estate coordination, with the reasoning behind each choice. From there we meet on a regular schedule, and whenever something changes that warrants a look.
We are fee-only. Our clients pay us directly, and we receive no commissions and no compensation from product providers. Nobody pays us to recommend anything.
This matters here because the recommendations touch insurance, annuities, and investment products, where commissions are standard across much of the industry. Our fee does not change based on which solution we recommend. As a Registered Investment Adviser we are also held to a fiduciary standard, required to act in your best interest and to disclose conflicts where they exist. Fee-only is not the same as fee-based, where an advisor charges fees and may also earn commissions.
Where Your Money Is Held
We never take possession of your assets. Your accounts are held in your name at Wells Fargo Clearing Services, an independent custodian. We have authority to manage those accounts and place trades. We cannot move your money to anyone else without your specific written authorization for that transfer.
Statements come directly from the custodian, and you can log in and see your holdings any time. If our numbers ever disagreed with the custodian's, the custodian's would be the record.T
his is standard among independent Registered Investment Advisers and worth asking about wherever you are considering. Firms that hold client assets themselves have a structural conflict that no amount of good intent removes.
You Work With Marc
At larger firms the advisor who wins your business is often not the one managing your account two years later. Accounts get reassigned to whoever has capacity, and the person who understood why you made a decision in 2019 has moved on.
Marc Daner has run this practice since 1993. He is the person in your first meeting and the person in your review meeting a decade from now. He holds the CFP® and ChFC® designations and has advised families through several full market cycles, including the ones that felt like they would not end.
That continuity is what makes coordination work. Knowing the reasoning behind a decision made six years ago is what keeps the next one from undoing it.
Frequently Asked Questions
There is no hard cutoff, but the coordination tends to earn its keep once your situation has several moving parts at once: a portfolio, equity compensation, a tax picture that is no longer simple, and an estate worth organizing. Our post on wealth management for high-income families walks through when the pieces start working against each other.
It can be. A single holding that grew into a large share of your net worth carries a risk you did not choose on purpose, and reducing it has tax consequences that need to be planned rather than rushed. We cover this in wealth preservation strategies during market uncertainty.
Mostly through decisions about where assets are held, when gains are realized, and how income is sequenced in retirement, rather than any single move. Our post on tax-efficient wealth management strategies covers asset location, Roth conversions, and the Georgia-specific angles.
No. We coordinate with them. We do not prepare tax returns and we do not draft legal documents. If you do not have those relationships, we can point you toward professionals in the area.
