Backbone Planning Partners

The firm functions as an outsourced family CFO, offering integrated financial management that sits above individual investment accounts. This includes coordinating investment policy, tax planning, cash-flow budgeting, risk management, and estate governance into a single, unified framework. The goal is to relieve the family of the burden of integrating advice from disparate lawyers, accountants, and money managers.

Investment management is typically one component of a broader planning engagement, not a standalone offering. The firm constructs portfolios with a capital-preservation bias, using a global asset allocation that often includes index-based public securities, active managers in less efficient niches, and curated access to private market funds. The emphasis is on after-tax, after-fee real returns tailored to each family's liquidity horizon.

Based on its nomenclature as a 'partners' entity, the firm likely serves a small, defined group of families rather than operating as a dedicated single-family office. Multi-family office structures allow the firm to pool intellectual capital and operational costs across several complex balance sheets, while maintaining a low profile and avoiding a broad commercial marketing presence.

Succession planning is the terminal value of the service. The firm coordinates the design of generation-skipping trusts, family limited partnerships, and grantor retained annuity trusts with outside counsel. It then maintains the accounting for those entities, monitors trustee activity, and prepares the next generation to receive wealth through education and structured governance protocols.

A standard wealth manager is compensated through asset-based fees on an investment portfolio. Backbone's value proposition is centered on the holistic balance sheet, charging a project or retainer fee structure that recognizes the non-investment work—cash-flow modeling, insurance analysis, buy-sell agreement funding coordination, and family education. This advisory-centric model creates a deeper, more durable advisory relationship.