Ep 472: Going Deep Into Multigenerational Planning To Better Serve HNW Clients (Not Just Retain Their Assets) with Carli Smith
Financial Advisor Success
Michael Kitces
4.7 • 719 Ratings
🗓️ 13 January 2026
⏱️ 87 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Multigenerational planning isn't just about retaining assets after a wealth transfer. When done well, it becomes a powerful way to elevate service, improve family communication, and drive meaningful growth today.
Carli Smith, founder of Signal Wealth Advisors, has built her practice in part by engaging entire family units—not just individual clients. In this episode, she explains how she navigates the tax and estate implications of inherited IRAs and taxable accounts, invites aging parents and adult children into collaborative planning conversations, and combines family assets to serve clients who might otherwise fall below her $2 million minimum. She also shares how strategic partnerships with estate planning attorneys and CPAs fueled a 70% increase in AUM in a single year, why nurturing client promoters leads to higher-quality referrals, and how she made the decision to leave her previous firm after it was acquired and start her own business.
For show notes and more visit: https://www.kitces.com/472
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to the Financial Advisor Success Podcast, where you go behind the scenes with |
| 0:07.1 | financial planner, speaker, and consultant Michael Kitsis to hear stories of how leading |
| 0:12.4 | financial advisors navigated the inevitable challenges that arise on the path to success |
| 0:17.4 | and get insight from leading industry consultants about how to break through to the next |
| 0:22.2 | level in your advisory business. And now here's your host, Michael Kitsis. Welcome, everyone. |
| 0:29.0 | Welcome to the 472nd episode of the Financial Advisor Success Podcast. My guest on today's podcast is |
| 0:35.1 | Carly Smith. Carly is the founder of Signal Wealth Advisors, |
| 0:38.5 | an RIA based in Austin, Texas, that oversees $143 million in assets under management for 67 client |
| 0:44.4 | households. What's unique about Carly, though, is how she engages in multi-generational planning |
| 0:49.4 | for her clients, not necessarily to retain the assets once the older generation passes on |
| 0:53.9 | and leaves them to the next generation, but rather to provide a deeper level of service and bring on members of multiple generations as clients today. |
| 1:01.2 | In this episode, we talk in depth about how Carly finds that she provides value to many clients by helping them sort through the dynamics of having significant assets in both traditional IRAs and taxable accounts |
| 1:11.5 | to pass on to the next generation, including what that means from a tax perspective for the future |
| 1:16.2 | inheritors, how Carly finds that such conversations with her core client, who typically have both |
| 1:21.0 | aging parents and adult children, frequently lead to these clients asking her to bring in members |
| 1:26.0 | of the older and younger generations to foster greater communication and transparency and how Carly's client families |
| 1:31.7 | can combine their assets for fee calculating purposes, allowing her to serve other members |
| 1:36.0 | of the family who might not meet her $2 million minimum for new clients, but are a key part |
| 1:40.1 | of the larger family's planning dynamics. |
| 1:43.0 | We also talk about how Carly grew her AUM by 70% |
| 1:46.4 | during the past year in part by cultivating relationships within generating referrals from local |
| 1:51.2 | estate planning attorneys, which also generate cross-referral opportunities, as her |
... |
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