Fitzpatricks Advice Partners has been helping Australians build, protect and transition wealth since 1994. A team of dedicated advisers, united by a shared philosophy.
Fitzpatricks Advice Partners has been helping Australians build, protect and transition wealth since 1994. A team of dedicated advisers, united by a shared philosophy.
Fitzpatricks Advice Partners has been helping Australians build, protect and transition wealth since 1994. A team of dedicated advisers, united by a shared philosophy.
The right trust protects your assets.
It takes something more to protect the family.
Wealthy Australian families have solicitors to establish legal structures and accountants to manage tax. What they often lack is someone to coordinate it all, and to help the family agree on how decisions are made, who benefits and when, and what happens when those who built the wealth are no longer in charge.
Wealth structuring and family governance are two parts of the same challenge. At Fitzpatricks Advice Partners, your Lead Adviser connects the legal framework of your assets with the human side of the equation, the discussions and agreements that ensure wealth serves the family it was built for.
You may already have capable solicitors and accountants. What is often missing is a single relationship across disciplines to ask the right questions, identify gaps, and bring everything together.
Our role is to ask the in-depth questions so they understand your broader financial affairs well enough to identify when a structural review is needed, involve the right specialists, and assess whether the recommendations genuinely fit your situation.
That means sitting alongside you throughout the process, not simply referring you on. Once recommendations are presented, your Lead Adviser asks the in-depth questions: does this fit your overall position? Does it align with your estate plan, your investment strategy, and your intentions for your family?
These are the questions that catch structural problems before they become expensive to unwind. Sometimes it goes further. Our advisers have helped identify the right lawyer in complex family situations, stayed involved throughout, and ensured the process progressed in the client’s interests.
It is what a Lead Adviser relationship, built over years, makes possible.
Your Lead Adviser connects the legal, financial and governance dimensions of your family’s wealth through a single ongoing relationship. But before any of that work begins, the Lead Adviser relationship starts with a conversation about your end goals and how you can achieve them in your desired timeframe. Structure and governance decisions made without that clarity rarely hold.
For families with structures that have evolved over time, having someone connect the pieces matters. Changes to a trust deed can have consequences for a binding death benefit nomination, for income splitting arrangements, and for how assets pass between generations. A decision made in isolation can create an estate planning problem that takes years to unwind. Your Lead Adviser understands enough about all of these to see where a decision made in one area creates a consequence in another, and to act on it before it becomes an issue.
Many families build significant wealth across multiple entities through hard work and sound decisions, not through a deliberate ownership structure designed from the outset.
The result is often assets in the wrong legal vehicles, trust deeds written decades ago and never reviewed, superannuation nominations that no longer reflect the family situation, and no formal process for shared decision-making.
The consequences of poor wealth structuring are specific. Assets held in the wrong legal vehicle attract unnecessary capital gains tax (CGT) on transfer. Estate plan assets go to the wrong beneficiaries when the structure does not align with the Will. Assets held in personal names rather than in trust are exposed to creditor claims in ways that a properly structured trust is not. Incorrect or poorly thought-out superannuation death benefit nominations resulting in the wrong beneficiaries receiving benefits with poor or less efficient tax outcomes. These are common structural failures we encounter when families first review existing arrangements.
In many families, there is no shared understanding of what the wealth is for, or how decisions should be made together. Over time, this leads to misalignment, fragmented communication and competing expectations.
A family can have well-structured trusts and still experience conflict when there is no clarity on decision-making, distribution of income, or expectations of the next generation. Structures protect the assets. Governance protects the family.
The decisions on which structures to use sit with your solicitor and accountant. Our role is to coordinate that process: making sure legal and tax advice connects to your complete financial picture, and that what the specialists recommend fits what you are trying to achieve.
The structures below are the ones we most commonly work with families on, and the ones your Lead Adviser is well equipped to challenge, test and explore. We work alongside estate planning solicitors, accountants and tax advisers, ensuring the legal structure connects directly to the private wealth portfolio management strategy for clients whose assets are actively invested.
A discretionary trust gives the trustee the power to decide, year by year, who receives income and capital distributions and in what amounts. That flexibility makes it the most widely used structure in Australian private wealth, but also the most widely misunderstood.
The benefits are tangible, but so are the obligations. A trust deed written for a family that looked very different a decade ago is a liability, not a planning tool.
A trust administered by an individual trustee carries risks that rarely become visible until something goes wrong. If the individual trustee dies or becomes incapacitated, continuity of the trust becomes a legal problem. If the trustee has personal creditor exposure, that exposure can affect trust-held assets in ways a corporate structure prevents.
A corporate trustee provides continuity, creates separation between trust assets and personal circumstances, and establishes a legal boundary that is significantly harder to challenge. It is a relatively small structural decision with a meaningful protective effect.
Superannuation does not automatically form part of an estate. But it may end up there if directed under a death benefit nomination, or where there is no nomination or the nomination is invalid. Nominations should be reviewed regularly, not set once and forgotten. Without a valid nomination, the death benefit defaults to the trustee's discretion, which may not align with the family's wishes or estate plan.
Testamentary trusts, created under a Will and activated on death, provide ongoing asset protection and tax benefits for beneficiaries that a straightforward estate distribution cannot replicate. For families with minor children or financially vulnerable beneficiaries, the structural difference is significant, and it cannot be retrofitted after the event.
The tools are practical: a Family Charter documenting values, decision-making rules and expectations across generations; a Family Council providing a regular forum for family financial discussions; and a deliberate plan for preparing the next generation to receive what has been built. For some families, governance extends to a formal advisory board, where a trusted adviser sits alongside the family in a structured capacity to support major decisions without holding a vote.
A Family Charter is not a legal document. It is a statement of what the family stands for, how it wants to make decisions about shared wealth, how new members are included and what each generation is expected to contribute before it benefits. Many families find that writing it is as valuable as having it: the process surfaces assumptions and disagreements that have existed for years without being named. The conversations it requires are rarely comfortable. They are almost always necessary. For Australian families, a family charter is one of the most practical governance tools available — and one of the most underused.
Different family members have different values, different risk tolerances, different financial needs and different views on what shared wealth should be used for. That is human nature. The question is whether the family has a process for managing those differences before they become disputes.
Our role is to help establish a governance framework that respects everyone’s interests and gives the wealth the best possible chance of serving the people it was built for.
Most parents hope their children will use an inheritance wisely. Practical preparation matters: financial literacy built gradually, appropriate involvement in investment and philanthropic decisions, and honest conversations about what the family expects. If intergenerational wealth management addresses the mechanics of the transfer, family wealth governance addresses whether the next generation is ready to receive it.
This may be relevant if you are:
For families whose complexity has grown to the point where governance becomes the operating structure for all of it, this work is often the natural precursor to an emerging family office model.
Whether you are reviewing an existing structure, considering a new one, or simply trying to get your family on the same page about wealth, the right starting point is a conversation that covers both the technical and the human dimensions. That is what we do.
There is no obligation and no pressure to decide quickly, and what you share stays with us. Talk to a Lead Adviser when the time feels right.
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