— 03 / Capabilities
Five mandates, executed with depth — for the family trusts and family offices in our care, and held to one fiduciary standard.
— i. Trustee & Fiduciary Services
Finnegan Capital LLC serves as Trustee, Co-Trustee, or Directed Trustee for the family trusts in our care. Each engagement is bounded by the trust instrument and administered with the discipline of a firm whose horizons are necessarily long.
Where instruments are drafted under directed-trust statutes — South Dakota, Delaware, Nevada, Tennessee, and other receptive jurisdictions — we hold the administrative seat and execute on the direction of the Investment and Distribution Committees named by the settlor. The structure preserves intent while allocating each function to the party best placed to discharge it.
Where the instrument grants the trustee discretion — over distributions, investments, or amendments to administrative provisions — we exercise it deliberately and on the written record. Discretionary acts are documented with their reasoning, the alternatives considered, and the standard of care applied, so that any successor trustee inherits a complete administrative history.
Several jurisdictions in which we administer trusts impose no rule against perpetuities. Such instruments are administered with that horizon in mind: investment policy, distribution policy, and beneficiary communication are framed for unborn beneficiaries as much as for living ones. GST tax planning is coordinated with counsel and produces filings designed to withstand examination decades after the fact.
Quiet-trust, silent-trust, and special purpose provisions are administered in strict accordance with the instrument's terms. Where notification is required, it is given on the prescribed schedule and in the prescribed form; where confidentiality is preserved, it is preserved without exception. The firm does not improvise on either side of the line.
Each engagement typically operates with an independent Trust Protector and named Investment, Distribution, and Amendment Committees. The firm acts as the institutional memory between them — preparing materials in advance of meetings, recording decisions in the form prescribed by the instrument, and ensuring that the limits of each role are respected.
Beneficiaries receive a fixed-cadence reporting package per engagement. Each trust's books are independently audited and tied to the per-Series records held below. Federal, state, and cross-border tax filings — including 1041, GST returns, foreign account and information returns where applicable — are prepared with outside counsel and filed on a calendar that leaves room for review, not reaction.
— ii. Investment Management
Capital is allocated across public markets, private markets, real assets, structured credit, and cash. The boundary between asset classes is administrative; the underwriting standard is the same in every cell.
Concentrated, research-driven equity exposure complemented by sovereign and high-grade corporate fixed income. Mandates are sized to the conviction behind them; index proxies are used only where conviction is genuinely absent. Manager relationships are long-dated, transparent on fees, and reviewable on a stated cadence.
Direct ownership of operating businesses, selective fund commitments, and co-investment alongside operating partners we know personally. We prefer durable cash-yielding businesses with long product cycles and management teams that intend to stay. Vintage discipline is maintained — we deploy through cycles, not into peaks.
Income-producing real estate, agricultural and timberland, infrastructure, and a small allocation to fine art and collectibles held for stewardship reasons rather than mark-to-market reasons. Holdings are owned directly or through dedicated Series, with operating partners on the ground in each jurisdiction.
Senior secured private credit, mezzanine financing for known operating partners, and selective participation in special-situations and dislocation funds. Counterparty discipline is non-negotiable; we will not extend credit to a balance sheet we cannot read or to a sponsor whose track record is undisclosed.
A laddered cash and treasuries program is maintained at each engagement to fund distributions, taxes, and committed capital calls without forced sales. Multi-currency exposures are managed at the Series level with explicit hedging policies, written down in advance and reviewed quarterly.
Every position carries a written thesis, a written downside, and a written exit. Concentration limits are set at both the Series and engagement level. Risk is not the volatility of the portfolio; it is the permanent impairment of capital meant for beneficiaries who have not yet arrived.
— iii. Estate & Succession Planning
Estate and succession design is the work that determines whether a hundred-year instrument remains coherent in twenty. We coordinate the structures, draft alongside counsel, and build in the review cadence the work demands.
We work with families and their counsel to design the trust instruments under which capital will pass — revocable and irrevocable trusts, dynasty trusts, special-purpose vehicles, and the directed-trust architectures that align authority with judgment. Drafting is led by counsel; the firm ensures the instrument is administrable in practice, not just elegant on paper.
Where the family's objective is multi-generational, we coordinate the GST allocation strategy, the structure of distribution standards, and the layering of incentive trusts where appropriate. Long-horizon design is, in our experience, the work that most often goes unfinished — and the work that most rewards finishing.
Grantor trusts, GRATs, IDGTs, sales to defective grantor trusts, family limited partnerships, and similar transfer techniques are evaluated against the family's actual liquidity, tax posture, and time horizon. We do not recommend a structure because it is fashionable; we recommend it because it survives audit, time, and the next legal regime.
Families with members or assets in multiple jurisdictions face succession regimes that rarely align. We coordinate domestic and foreign counsel to keep wills, trust instruments, marital regimes, and forced-heirship rules in working harmony — with documents that are translated, executed, and filed in each relevant jurisdiction on a known schedule.
Charitable lead trusts, charitable remainder trusts, donor-advised funds, and private foundations are designed and administered as part of the broader plan, not as afterthoughts. Where a family's philanthropic and tax objectives are aligned, the structure is designed to honour both — and where they are not, the trade-off is made on the record.
Tax law moves; instruments do not. Each engagement's plan is reviewed annually against statutory drift, treaty changes, and family circumstance — and amended in the manner the instrument permits. The firm's job is to ensure that a plan written in one decade still works in the next, without surprises.
— iv. Family Office Services
Around trustee and investment work sits a suite of family-office disciplines — governance, tax, philanthropy, reporting, custody and risk — that keep the architecture coherent over decades.
For each family, we maintain a written charter describing decision rights, communication norms, dispute resolution, and the conditions under which the next generation assumes responsibility. Annual family assemblies are convened; minutes are kept; education for rising beneficiaries is structured, not improvised.
Domestic and cross-border tax planning is coordinated with outside counsel and accounting firms of long-standing relationship. Estate-freeze techniques, GST-exempt structures, and multi-jurisdiction succession planning are designed once and reviewed annually against statutory drift. Filings are prepared on a calendar that leaves room for review.
Foundations, donor-advised funds, and direct grant-making are administered to the same standard as investment Series. A mission-aligned sleeve is reserved for impact-first capital where the family's social return is the primary thesis. Programmatic strategy is built deliberately, not by donation request.
Assets are held with first-tier custodians selected for balance-sheet strength, operational discipline, and legal jurisdiction. Banking relationships are concentrated where it improves oversight and diversified where it reduces fragility. Authorised-signer policies, callback procedures, and dual-control protocols are written down and tested.
Property, liability, directors-and-officers, fiduciary, and cyber insurance are maintained at the parent and Series levels in the form prescribed by counsel. Operational risk — the risk of a process failing, not a market falling — is mapped, documented, and reviewed annually with internal audit.
Beneficiaries and committees receive a consolidated quarterly statement showing each Series, each manager, each fee, each attribution line. Performance is reported gross and net, in the engagement's reporting currency and in the underlying. The objective of reporting is not persuasion; it is legibility.
— v. Series LLC Architecture
The Wyoming Series LLC is the firm's organising chassis. Each engagement sits within its own protected cell — separate books, separate banking, separate counsel — under a single fiduciary at the parent.
Each Series is formed with a written charter that names its purpose, its authorised activities, the capital it is funded with, and the conditions under which it may borrow, distribute, or wind down. No Series is opened without a charter. No charter is amended without the instrument-prescribed process.
Wyoming statute permits a Series to hold its own assets and to bear only its own liabilities, provided records are maintained accordingly. We treat that condition as a discipline, not a presumption: each Series carries its own ledgers, its own bank accounts, its own EIN where appropriate, and its own counsel of record.
Cash, securities, and operating accounts are titled to the individual Series, not to the parent. Inter-Series transfers, when they occur, are documented as arms-length transactions with formal authorisation and an audit trail. Commingling is treated as a material event and reported as such.
Where a mandate touches multiple Series — a co-investment, a shared service, a pooled hedge — the relationship is governed by a written intercompany agreement reviewed annually. The parent provides governance; it does not provide cover.
Each Series is designed to be windable: assets liquidated or transferred, books closed, counsel released, and a final accounting filed with the parent. The discipline of being able to close cleanly is, in our view, the discipline of having opened deliberately.