The kids are back in school, which means tuition checks are going out. It's got me thinking about college savings, and the question I always start with: what are you actually trying to accomplish?

Ten years ago, almost nobody asked how an independent Registered Investment Advisor (RIA) firm was built. Now I get the question much more frequently, which makes sense given what most of you do for a living. Private equity is buying RIA businesses, investing in the infrastructure underneath them, and increasingly selling into the wealth channel.

There is a tendency in finance to equate sophistication with complexity. More accounts. More strategies. More entities. More products. More moving pieces. Sometimes those things are warranted. But complexity, by itself, isn’t sophistication. In many cases, the more sophisticated outcome is a financial life that feels simple.

The portfolio that holds your liquidity does not need to win every day. It needs to stay in the game long enough for the odds to do their work.

Over the past few years, I’ve watched a number of private equity professionals leave good firms to build something of their own. At first, I took each one as its own story. But the pattern kept repeating. It started to look less like a series of one-offs and more like a signal about where private equity is in its own life cycle.

I use a phrase with clients constantly, and I think it's worth slowing down to explain it. It's the foundation of how I see your entire financial picture, and it often gets glossed over. Your carried interest is “long levered equity”. Three words, and each one is doing work.

The hardest financial question is rarely the one with the most math. For many private equity professionals, “enough” is not really about retirement, but about building a financial life where the next move becomes a choice instead of an obligation.

In this article, we walk through 'the donut hole' as a framework to illustrate why net worth and accessible cash can diverge inside a PE career, and why planning for the gap as a permanent feature of the balance sheet can play a critical role in how each cycle plays out.

Explore a framework built for Private Equity professionals to run through when handling an exit.

This video breaks down Larry Fink’s latest annual letter and what it signals about the growing role of private markets in global wealth creation. We reframe these ideas specifically for private equity professionals, exploring how additional private markets exposure interacts with your existing concentration, liquidity profile, and career risk.