In this episode of The Same Day Podcast, host Yoni Schmidt sits down with Mark Miller, President and CEO of Hilton Tax & Wealth Advisors, to discuss how ultra-wealthy investors build legacy wealth. They talk about formal tax planning, advanced wealth preservation strategies, and the family office approach to managing risk. Mark also shares the importance of diversification and building safety-first portfolios.
The Secrets Ultra-Wealthy Investors Use To Build Legacy Wealth With Mark Miller
Mark Miller is the President and CEO of Hilton Tax & Wealth Advisors, a boutique firm specializing in advanced tax mitigation and holistic wealth planning for high-net-worth individuals, business owners, and professionals. With over 30 years of experience, he has helped clients save $100 million in taxes and grow their wealth by over $200 million. Mark is the best-selling author of Hilton Wealth: How to Invest Like an American Dynasty and The Tax-Free Business Owner, and has been featured in major outlets including The New York Times, Kiplinger’s, and Fox News. He also received a personal commendation from President George W. Bush for his efforts to help Americans build their businesses and wealth.
Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:
- [2:18] Mark Miller talks about his transition from American Express to managing the Hilton family office
- [4:39] Why ultra-wealthy families invest differently using smart money strategies
- [6:32] The common mistake of relying too heavily on CPAs for tax planning
- [11:28] How formalized tax plans use legal codes and multiple advanced strategies
- [16:28] The role of real estate and private equity in diversified wealth portfolios
- [22:03] Using due diligence and backstops to safeguard investments in family office deals
In this episode…
Building wealth isn’t just about earning more; it’s about protecting and growing what you already have. While many business owners and professionals focus on returns, the ultra-wealthy play a different game. What secrets do they use to build lasting wealth across generations?
According to Mark Miller, a leading expert in advanced tax and wealth planning, the wealthy prioritize safety and risk management first, allowing returns to follow naturally. Ultra-wealthy families leverage sophisticated tax codes, formalized tax plans, and multi-layered asset protection strategies rarely offered by traditional advisors. By focusing on legal, ethical, and highly specialized tax approaches, they can minimize or eliminate tax liability entirely. Mark also emphasizes that true wealth building includes diversification, careful due diligence, and building trusted long-term relationships to safeguard investments.
Resources mentioned in this episode:
- Yonatan Schmidt on LinkedIn
- Mat Zalk on LinkedIn
- Keyrenter Property Management
- Keyrenter Property Management in Tulsa | Oklahoma City | Arkansas
- Keyrenter Property Management email address: [email protected]
- Mark Miller on LinkedIn
- Hilton Tax & Wealth Advisors
- Hilton Wealth: How to Invest Like an American Dynasty by Mark Miller
- The Tax-Free Business Owner: How Business Owners Can Use the Tax Code to Legally Pay Zero Taxes by Mark Miller
- “How To Safeguard Property Investments in a Divorce With Ben Aussenberg” on The Same Day Podcast
- “Revitalizing Communities Through Multi-Concept Restaurant Development” with Elliot Nelson on The Same Day Podcast
- “The Future of Financial Advising: Building Relationships Over Returns” with Morgan Martin on The Same Day Podcast
Quotable Moments
- “The wealthiest of the wealthiest do what regular investors don’t do to build wealth faster.”
- “Tax planning is actually putting a formal plan together that has specific strategies and legal codes.”
- “We develop those relationships, and most of what we do, we’ve had relationships ten years plus.”
- “The most important thing in business is who you’re working with and building relationships.”
- “Focus on safety and security first. The returns are going to be there if invested properly.”
Action Steps
- Create a formalized tax plan with multiple strategies: Establishing a proactive, customized plan can significantly reduce tax liability and maximize wealth growth.
- Diversify investments across asset classes: Spreading assets beyond real estate and equities helps protect wealth from market volatility and economic shifts.
- Conduct extensive due diligence before investing: Rigorously vetting deals and partners minimizes risks and safeguards long-term financial stability.
- Utilize fringe benefit and Augusta Rule strategies: Leveraging these underused tax codes can legally generate tax-free income and optimize business deductions.
- Prioritize safety and risk management over returns: Focusing on preservation ensures that wealth remains intact even during unpredictable market conditions or downturns.
Sponsor for this episode…
Keyrenter Property Management:
This episode is brought to you by Keyrenter Property Management.
Keyrenter Property Management is a full-service property management company that helps clients buy, renovate, and operate real estate assets.
The team helps clients build wealth while taking the headache out of property management.
That’s why, no matter what rental you have — single-family homes, condos, townhomes, or apartments — they can give you the management solutions you need.
To learn more about their services, go to https://keyrenterpmc.com/ or send them an email at [email protected].
Episode Transcript
Intro 00:05
Welcome to The Same Day Podcast, where we discuss driving incremental business growth and other topics related to real estate, property management and entrepreneurship. Now to the show at hand.
Yonatan Schmidt 00:20
Hi there. Yoni Schmidt here, hosting today’s episode of The Same Day Podcast, where I connect with top business and real estate leaders. Some of our past guests include Zach LeMaster of Rent to Retirement, Ben Aussenberg, a local family law attorney, Elliot Nelson, the CEO of Mcnellie’s Group, and Morgan Martin of Merrill Lynch. Today’s episode is brought to you by Keyrenter Property Management. At Keyrenter Property Management, we are a full service property management company helping our clients buy, renovate and operate real estate assets.
We help our clients build wealth while taking the headache out of property management. That is why no matter what asset in the real estate world, you have single family homes, condos, townhomes, apartments. We have the management solutions you need. Go to keyrenterpmc.com or email us at [email protected].
Today’s guest is someone who understands wealth like few others. Mark Miller is the President and CEO of Hilton Tax & Wealth Advisors, a boutique firm that partners with the Hilton family to offer elite financial, tax and legacy planning strategies to clients. With more than three decades in tax and financial services industry, Mark has helped hundreds of business owners, executives and physicians reduce taxes, grow wealth, and preserve family legacies. He is also the best selling author of the Hilton Wealth: How to Invest Like an American Dynasty, and has been featured in over 200 major media outlets including Fox News, The New York Times, and Money Magazine.
Mark brings a legacy of trust, innovation and results driven strategy, and we are honored to have him here today. Welcome to the show and thank you for being here.
Mark Miller 02:04
Well, thanks so much. It’s a pleasure being here with you today.
Yonatan Schmidt 02:08
Well, Mark, let’s just dive right in. Tell us how you became involved with the Hilton family and what inspired your approach to wealth and tax strategy?
Mark Miller 02:18
Absolutely. Well, when I got out of college, I was very enamored with the whole money business. And and I immediately went to work for a small little firm called American Express and did extremely well. There was on the brokerage side, did well, and kind of was on the retail money management side of things. And and it was very enamored with stocks and bonds and buying and selling and trading and all of those things which are kind of retail strategies.
Being obsessed with that, I should say, is kind of a retail kind of thing. And, you know, just over the years, I started developing some kind of higher level clients that were more on what’s called the institutional side of the business, what we call smart money. And my book, Hilton Wealth. I explain what smart money is. It’s just basically the people that are getting a heck of a lot better deals, better returns, lower fees, more safety than the average folks.
And so over the years, I just developed more relationships on the institutional side, eventually met the Hilton’s. We’ve done a lot of things with the Hilton’s for the last maybe 12, 13 years. They’ve made me a lot of money. I’ve made them a lot of money and different things. And they came to me about three years ago and said, hey, are you are you interested in being the manager of the Hilton family office for the Hilton family itself?
And then said, yes, but Brad Hilton and I Brad is the is the grandson of Conrad Hilton, who is the original founder of Hilton Hotels, had this passion. Let’s build a firm alongside the family office. That would be for for folks that don’t have access to these kind of smart money types of strategies. And that’s where Hilton Tax & Wealth Advisors came from. And that’s what we’re really talking a lot about now, because we just Brad and I both have a passion for really helping people that, you know, don’t have 10 million or 20 million or 5 million even to to, you know, really build their wealth better.
Yonatan Schmidt 04:25
Yeah. And so in your book, Hilton Wealth, you mentioned investing like an American dynasty. I’m guessing, you know, that’s what you mean by by saying that, right? Is like or could you break that down a little bit for us?
Mark Miller 04:39
Yeah. So so we’re really the book is about how to invest like the Hilton’s have invested. Most people know the Hilton name and its hotels. Well, first of all, the Hilton’s don’t. The Hilton family doesn’t even own the hotels anymore.
Hasn’t since 20 1314, in that range. Age. But the Hiltons have, have, have had a lot of other offshoot businesses. And even Conrad Hilton, who was the the real estate dynasty, basically, he invested in a lot of other things too. So this is really the book is just teaching people what the wealthiest of the wealthiest do that regular investors don’t do to build their wealth much faster and even build, like you mentioned, legacy wealth in the introduction.
Most people, they think that’s out of reach to them. But but really not anymore. Information, information revolution. And really we’re kind of playing on that right now using a lot of AI, a lot of cutting edge and very innovative types of ways to show people that they can truly invest like the wealthiest of the wealthy, invest, you know, have access to these incredible tax strategies. You know, you hear the politicians all the time said that person didn’t pay any taxes.
Well, most likely they’re not disobeying the laws and the rules, otherwise they’d be in jail. They’re doing things that are legal, ethical and moral, but they’re in the codes. They can do that and they can get to a zero tax bracket. So we’re teaching things, things, strategies like that to folks that wouldn’t normally have access to those kind of strategies.
Yonatan Schmidt 06:19
Yeah. Let’s talk a little bit about the tax strategy and wealth building. What what are the biggest mistakes that you’re seeing that high income professionals or business owners make when it comes to tax planning?
Mark Miller 06:32
Oh, that is a great question. The first thing that they’re relying on their CPA too much and they’re listening to their CPA too much. Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not here to trash CPAs. They work with us. I’m not a CPA myself, but we work with them every day.
We need to have them because they we got to have people that that that keep track of the X’s and O’s, right? But most CPAs are just glorified tax preparers. Probably about 95% of them. Now, why is that? And most people think they’re the most knowledgeable people on money.
They ask them all kinds of questions. All of that. Is because for the average CPA, let’s say they go out and do their own practice. Well, they’re fine with just getting 2 or 300 tax returns in that mix. They’re going to have a bunch of business tax returns.
Plus they’re going to get some auditing in there, and they’re going to make 7 or $800,000 a year. Okay. For most CPAs, that is like they’ve hit the lottery. You know, they most of them aren’t real. The greatest business people.
They’re they’re technicians at what they do do. And I’m, I’m broadly and by the way, I’m stereotyping a little bit. Yeah. There were some CPA here. What’s that?
Yonatan Schmidt 07:48
I said don’t let my CPA hear this. Yeah.
Mark Miller 07:50
No, don’t let them hear this. But but you know what? It’s funny. When I talk to CPAs, they don’t disagree. They know because a lot of times what will happen, people will come to them.
They’ll see something on the internet, especially nowadays because there’s so much information out there. Hey, I heard about this strategy where I could save money. Looks like it’s pretty legit. Could you take a look at it? The general the general answer to that is no.
Don’t do that strategy. Now, why is that? It’s not because they did an in-depth look and and vetted that strategy for you. It’s because if they do that, then it takes away from their core business that is doing lots of tax returns, doing auditing, doing other financial stuff that they’re trained at as certified public accountants, excuse me, as certified public accountants to do that takes away their focus to be able to make the money they’re used to be making. Okay.
So so the big thing I would say, and we educate and I talk about this in the book, in a full chapter in the book is to not rely on your CPA and not believe that your CPA has the answers to everything, because really, most just have the answer to being able to very expertly fill out tax forms and to get you filed on time. Okay.
Yonatan Schmidt 09:10
Yeah. Interesting. Yeah. Tell us, I guess from your experience, what’s the most overlooked tax saving strategy that you wish more people knew about?
Mark Miller 09:20
Well, so let me tell you, let me start at the beginning. And I didn’t fully answer your question there that you asked previously is that first and foremost is understand the power of tax planning and what is tax planning? Well, first of all, there has to be a formalized tax plan. Okay. That the vast majority of people that come into contact with us and we meet for the first time have no plan at all.
It’s just, hey, we’ll do give us all your stuff at the first of the year from last year, last year’s numbers, that’s already happened. And then we’ll put, we’ll file your returns for you and then we’re done. That’s to a lot of CPAs actually. If you if you talk to them they might then say put some more money in a 401 K or an IRA or that that’s the tax plan. CPAs will say that’s tax planning, okay.
It’s not formalized. Tax planning is actually putting a formal plan together that has specific strategies that have the codes, private letter rulings, case law behind them that are legal, moral, ethical, but are deep dives into the things that you can do and then have 4 or 5, six, seven different strategies that are actually in your plan to cut your taxes significantly. In many cases, we work with many clients where we can get to them to the zero tax bracket pretty quickly.
Yonatan Schmidt 10:44
Yeah. So in the world, I mean, if I’m using, you know, examples from our own world, it would be I’m doing cost segregation studies to help you, you know, achieve accelerated depreciation so that you can, you know, pay less taxes, which is and.
Mark Miller 11:00
That might be an advanced strategy. That’s one advanced strategy. We might have 2 or 3 advanced strategies. We may have 4 or 5 just straight deep dive code strategies that CPAs know about. But they’re not going to implement because it involves some implementation.
Okay. It’s not that they they can’t do them or they’re again, you know, not moral or ethical or they break laws or anything. It’s just that they don’t do them.
Yonatan Schmidt 11:27
Yeah.
Mark Miller 11:28
That’s that that encompasses kind of a full on and again why I said first tax a tax plan is important because it’s like anything you got a marketing plan in your business. You’ve got a business plan generally if if you’re really good, you’ve got other types of planning that formalize planning that you’re doing in your business With processes and all of that. Well, most practically, no one has any kind of tax plan.
Yonatan Schmidt 11:55
Yeah. So let me ask you this. Another, you know, very specific example that relates to me. And potentially also a lot of real estate investors that, you know, are our clients and they work with us. Oftentimes we have home offices.
Right. So that is square footage in your home that you’re using as your study, which I’m sitting in right now. Sure. And, you know, I have been told in the past that I could use some of that, right. Or the value of that as a deduction for my taxes.
Right. And when I brought that to my CPA and my CPA recommended that I don’t do it, because in the event that I go to sell the property, then that portion of the property is taxed differently than the rest of the home.
Mark Miller 12:42
Well, yeah, that’s deep in the weeds. Okay. So here’s the thing. Let me just a little higher level. The tax code gives us three distinct ways that they say that we can deduct our home offices.
Okay. There’s also some other workarounds that allow us to even deduct more that we work with our clients on. Okay. So I thought you were going to say because what I hear a lot is the CPA say, don’t do that because this could be a red flag. Okay.
Well, there are no red flags to that. And frankly, if if you’re going to be in your home for any period of time, what that what your CPA is talking about is so far down the road that if you just ignore your home office deduction, you’ve just missed out on a tremendous amount of deductions that you could have taken. So I won’t go into the weeds of that strategy. I know what they’re talking about there. But but but that’s that’s too much into the weeds.
There’s also some other things to do. You may have heard of the Augusta rule. Yeah, a lot of people have heard of Augusta rule, basically where you can basically rent out your home to your business up to 14 days a year, depending on the area, and you can take 1000 $1,500 a day as a collection out of that for 14 days. That’s a lot of money, and that’s a big chunk of money. What that does is basically allow you to pay yourself back.
And again, I won’t we don’t have time to go into all the details of the strategy. But basically what you’re doing with that strategy and a lot of other strategies too, is you’re paying yourself back from your company and technically then that money, because then you can go use that money and it becomes tax free money to you. So so we want to generally install strategies like that. But the Augusta rule is very much a long a long the, the side or can work in conjunction in conjunction with your home office deduction.
Yonatan Schmidt 14:39
Interesting. Okay. I better look into that a little more closely. Tell us, I guess you know You know what is one of the most overlooked tax saving strategies that you wish more people knew about? I asked that a second ago, but.
Mark Miller 14:53
I know, I know you did. I know you did. Well, the Augusta rule is one of them. I would also say that often people overlook their fringe benefit options, because there’s a lot of small things you can do in the fringe benefit side. Again, to pay yourself back with tax free money that comes back into your coffers that you can bring if, let’s say you have an S corporation, if you bring this money back, then you can bring the amount of of.
Income that you pay yourself down to. Okay. If you do these other strategies. So you’re not going to be paying as much in W2 on a W2 income as normal. Also.
So fringe benefit strategies are anywhere from. Specifically, if you’re looking at different types of insurance and the proper insurance to get. If you’re also looking at different things that you can do with your home and additions you can do to your home can be considered fringe benefits also. So again, I won’t go into too many details, but again, all these types of things are things that need to be looked at to see if they make sense to go into a formal tax plan for any individual.
Yonatan Schmidt 16:09
Yeah. Interesting. Okay. Let’s talk a little bit more about real estate and alternative and alternative investment strategies that I believe you guys employ. How does real estate fit into the Hilton True Wealth portfolios, and why do you recommend it for long term wealth?
Mark Miller 16:28
Yeah. So so our first of all, let me give you a little high level view of the true wealth portfolios are how we’ve designed kind of in a retail way, how the smart money invests. Okay. We generally use what we call a bucket concept. And you can read about this in in my book.
By the way, if you go to HiltonWealth.com hilton.com, you can order the book, no charge. We’ll get it out to you. So there’s four buckets. We have a very safe, secure bucket with a myriad of investment opportunities available in it that are generally not accessible on the retail side. Then our second bucket is more of an income generating bucket.
The third bucket is more of a traditional type of finance bucket, which would be like manage money. But we’re doing it with the best money managers in the world. And then the fourth bucket is that private equity alternative bucket where we’re real estate investments would fit in. And obviously we’re very high on real estate. We have a lot of ways to invest in real estate in different ways on the debt side, on the equity side, all of that.
And but we believe real estate definitely should be playing into anyone’s portfolio now. Some real estate folks that I work with, they think it should be all of their portfolio. And I get that. I totally get that and understand that. But a lot of times, for instance, I just brought a gentleman on board that has had a tremendous amount of success in the storage business.
Yeah. And created a lot of revenue and a lot of net worth. He finally realized, he says, it’s great that I’m doing this. I understand the business and I feel like it’s very safe, but it kind of just dawned upon him when he got our book that I need to diversify a little bit because there’s other opportunities in other places, and you still have to. And we still always view real estate in that fourth bucket that, you know, something major happens in the economy or to a real estate deal.
I mean, it can really have a significant effect in your portfolio long term. So we like the allocation. I try not to step on too many of my real estate folks toes too much. Some of them are like, nope, nope, I want this, I want that, and I and that’s great. But but we advocate because the smart money advocates that you need to be pretty well allocated and diversified across many different types of asset classes, not just real estate.
Yonatan Schmidt 19:03
Yeah. As a real estate investor, I would tend to agree because I’m also in both the markets and you know, and real assets.
Mark Miller 19:12
That’s great. Yeah.
Yonatan Schmidt 19:14
So tell us, I guess, you know, you mentioned some risk. How does your team assess risk and volatility when you’re evaluating, you know, these investment opportunities.
Mark Miller 19:25
Well I’m going to talk about it from the family office perspective. So in the family office world it’s all about due diligence. And I’m sure that a lot of your real estate people listening will know what that means, that it’s doing your vetting and deep due diligence. For instance, we have our family office has 146 point checklist. We go into before we look at any project, working with a company, any deal or whatever.
We’ll generally look at everything and do deep dives on their books, deep dives on all the principles, all of that type of thing. So I and I’m going to say this, and you’ve probably some of your folks probably heard this before in business. We found and the Hiltons, of course, found that the most important thing in business is who you’re working with and relationships and building relationships and not jumping right into investing with people when you’ve known them for six months, or that you develop these long term relationships because business is about people and and investing really is about people quality, working with quality people. So first and foremost we’re looking at that. But then of course we’re looking at all the numbers.
We’re looking at the deal structure, we’re looking we’re doing a massive amount of due diligence to make sure that the Hiltons aren’t getting involved in something that has the potential to, you know, something to pop up that we didn’t know about. You know that that surprises someone. What we do. That’s a little unique in the family office. And we brought it into Hilton Tax & Wealth Advisors is to also usually put backstops on most of everything that we do.
Now, what do I mean by that? So we develop those relationships and most of what we do, we’ve had relationships with folks for ten years plus, okay, that that offer different deals and all of that type of thing to us is that then the the next step that we’re going to go to is making sure that they, they have the wherewithal to to stand long term. And that usually comes down to assets. That they have, are they? Let’s say that our client comes in and they invest $500,000 or 100,000.
Okay. Then we’re saying, well, if our client is going to invest that or if the Hiltons are going to invest that. What assurances do we have? What backstop do we have if something goes wrong? And then have them pledge assets.
Yonatan Schmidt 22:01
Okay.
Mark Miller 22:03
And sometimes we’re in first position, at least second position. But we already know the deal is going to be probably 90% or 95% chance it’s going to be fine. But what happens if we’ve got a fire sale? Something or something goes wrong that we want collateral there? Sometimes two, sometimes three, sometimes five times collateral.
So that’s a little bit different that we do because most people investing out there are going into deals and they don’t have any kind of backstop. They’re just like, hey, this looks great. I think it’s going to go, I hope it’s going to go Okay, well, in our deals, if they don’t go, it’s very rare for any of our deals to even default. But if they did, then there’s generally going to be a backstop built into it that everybody’s going to at least get all their principal back, if not their principal plus interest or what what was ever guaranteed to them up front? Yeah.
Yonatan Schmidt 22:58
Interesting. Yeah. Well, I’m glad you brought up family office. Let’s talk about that and legacy planning just for a little bit. A lot of our listeners are, you know, investors, entrepreneurs and, you know, how should they be thinking about succession planning?
Mark Miller 23:14
Yeah, that’s really, really I just had a conversation today with with somebody about that. I think everybody should have a succession plan. I don’t know if it needs to necessarily, depending on what business you’re in and if you’re a small business owner and it’s just you and your wife or something like that or husband, it’s probably not that huge of a deal to have a massive succession plan. But if you’ve got any kind of substantial company, you should have some kind of succession plan in place, whether it’s family members, whether it’s partners, that there’s some kind of something formalized to know what’s going to happen if a key principal leaves or for that fact even passes away, or something happens to them, or they get sick or something like that. So we work with a lot of our clients to do that.
And I think ultimately it’s important if you have a big enough company to have some sort of succession plan.
Yonatan Schmidt 24:14
Yeah. What what’s your process for helping families, you know, pass the wealth across generations without losing it to taxes or poor planning?
Mark Miller 24:23
Well, generally what we’ll do is we’ll do a lot of different trust planning, charitable trust planning, if ultimately that’s what our goal is with some of our wealthiest clients. When you start and and you know, I brought on a client not long ago. That was kind of new money. They had just sold a big financial services company that they had. They never had this kind of money, and they were just like, hey, we’re just going to do things like, we just normally do things, okay, we’ve got this guy over at Schwab, he invests our money, we’ve got our property and casualty guy that will do our insurance.
And I explained to them that once you get to a level of wealth, you can’t do that anymore. You have to move into some legacy planning to because because it gets more complex now, ironically, it gets more complex. But one of the things that we specialize in is trying to simplify that complexity. So it’s still relatively easy and people will understand. But but people also need to understand if they have enough wealth, they start building.
And we’ve had clients, we’ve had to transition into this. When we start building their wealth over time, that once you get to a certain level, you have to start doing advanced, you know, planning and legacy planning. Otherwise, you’re going to run into a myriad of problems, family situations with, you know, how you have things, structured fees, you name it. It’s just a myriad of problems if you’re not doing some advanced planning in those areas.
Yonatan Schmidt 26:01
What do you what would you say is the level of wealth where you need to start thinking about that? Is it a seven figure? You know.
Mark Miller 26:08
I mean, I’d say probably when we start getting to 7 or 8 million in that range, okay, we really have to do some more advanced legacy planning. I just finished up with a client where we did a, a specialized trust into a basically, it’s driven by kind of institutionally designed life insurance. That’s going to leverage there and solve just a myriad of problems. And they were probably about in that $8 million range.
Yonatan Schmidt 26:39
Yeah. Let’s talk about implementation and practice. Tell us about, you know, the timeline and process for someone who wants to go through your tax and wealth evaluation?
Mark Miller 26:51
Sure. Well, first of all, the first thing I recommend is get the book Hilton Wealth. It’s short. It’s only 100 pages long. And we did it that on that way in.
Brad. Brad Hilton and I did not want to make a 400 page book and and and I warn everybody, we don’t have every strategy and tactic we do in there because you can only put so much in 100 pages. But generally what we do then we want to get you a feel of what we do and how we do it. Often people think what we do is unbelievable and it can’t be done, but it is every day in our family office and every day at Hilton Tax &Wealth.
So if you like what you read and you’re saying, I want to explore this then and we make our the the barrier to entry in Hilton Tax & Wealth very low. It’s portfolios of 250,000 plus and that you’re paying maybe, you know, 20, 30, 40,000 in taxes plus. And of course, we work with a lot of people with higher levels than that. But we just make that barrier pretty low because we want to help as many people as possible. So then what we’ll do, we’ll just get on.
And generally what I do, I like to have my first appointment. Personally, I like to talk to people personally, have about a 20 minute conversation with them and see if they’re a good fit for what we do, see if we’re a good mutual fit and then we just go from there.
Yonatan Schmidt 28:06
Yeah. Love it. So just for our listeners, you know, this is not a ultra high net worth individual firm. You would you would basically take on clients who have about $250,000 in wealth in invested investments. Yeah, in assets in those assets can be real assets.
Financial assets, a mix of the two.
Mark Miller 28:32
Yeah. Sure. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah.
Yonatan Schmidt 28:34
Okay. Love it. Let’s talk about reflection and rapid fire here a little bit. What’s one lesson from the Hiltons that you profoundly that profoundly shaped your philosophy on wealth?
Mark Miller 28:48
So I’m going to say this of the Hiltons, but it’s also true of smart money investors. A very, very wealthy investors to focus on safety and security. First, on the retail side, whether you know it or not, it’s focused on returns first. That’s why the biggest seller is mutual funds. Still is has the most trillions of money in it.
How do they sell mutual funds over the one, three, five, ten year performance? Pick a mutual fund based upon that. And people do all the time. Okay. It’s the wrong way to go about it.
The biggest thing that I’ve learned on the smart money side and from the Hiltons was first and foremost focus on safety. The returns are going to be there if you have good access and you know the proper things to invest in, they’re just going to be there. You might as well focus to make sure that if something really bad happens, that you’re not going to lose half of your wealth or three quarters of your wealth. And we do that by helping folks understand that a good percentage of their assets needs to be very safe and secure, secure and be very predictable.
Yonatan Schmidt 29:54
Interesting. Mark, finish this sentence for me. If I could give one piece of advice to someone looking to grow and preserve their wealth, it would be.
Mark Miller 30:06
Well, I’d probably just reiterate what I just said. Focus on safety first.
Yonatan Schmidt 30:10
Safety first.
Mark Miller 30:11
And and don’t be so hyper focused on the long term outcomes, which, by the way, no one can predict the future. Absolutely no one. They say we can’t predict the future, but we do know history tends to doesn’t repeat itself. But it rhymes. Okay.
So we’re looking at more, you know, putting a good poem together. When we design a true wealth plan for someone that we think is has the highest likelihood of succeeding. And it’s got to start. And it has to start with safety and security.
Yonatan Schmidt 30:50
Love it. Well, folks, you heard it from Mark Miller of Hilton Tax & Wealth Advisors. Go to hiltonwealth.com. Right.
Mark Miller 31:01
Right. hiltonwealth.com.
Yonatan Schmidt 31:02
Yeah. To learn more information order your book and you can contact Mark and his team. We’ll put some links in the in the comments below. Mark, thank you so much for your time and for enlightening and educating me.
Mark Miller 31:18
Well thank you. Appreciate it.
Outro 31:23
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