There’s a version of investment planning that’s about picking stocks, timing markets, and building portfolios. That’s not what I do, and on this page I want to be clear about that upfront. I’m a Certified Financial Planner™ and a CPA, and the investment work I do for clients is about how their portfolio fits with everything else – the tax return, the estate plan, the retirement accounts, the business interests, the eventual transfer to the next generation. The portfolio itself usually has someone else managing it. My job is to make sure the decisions being made inside that portfolio account for the rest of the picture.
I’m Lawrence Israeloff. I’ve been doing this work for clients across Long Island and New York City for over two decades.
The phrase “tax-efficient investing” gets used loosely. Here’s what it concretely refers to in the work I do with clients:
I want to be explicit about what I don’t do, because it matters for setting expectations.
I don’t manage portfolios. I don’t pick individual securities. I don’t rebalance accounts. I’m not registered as an investment adviser in the sense that means discretionary asset management. If you’re looking for someone to take your $2 million account and run it, I’m not that person, and I’ll happily refer you to advisors I trust who do that work well.
What I do is sit alongside your existing advisor (or help you find one if you don’t have one) and bring the tax, legal, and estate planning lens that most pure investment professionals don’t. When your advisor proposes a rebalance, I can tell you what it’ll cost in taxes and whether there’s a better-timed alternative. When your CPA flags an opportunity for a Roth conversion, I can model whether it actually makes sense given your investment picture. When your estate plan calls for funding a trust, I can help structure which assets to use and in what order.
The clients who benefit most from this arrangement already have an investment advisor or are sophisticated enough to manage their own portfolio, and they want a coordinator – someone who sees how the pieces interact and catches the things that fall between specialists.
The clients I do investment planning work for tend to fall into a few groups. High-net-worth individuals with complex tax situations, where coordination across professionals is the main source of value. Business owners whose personal and business finances overlap and who need both treated together. Families planning education funding, retirement, or wealth transfer across generations. Professionals (physicians, attorneys, executives) with concentrated equity compensation, deferred comp, or unusual income patterns. And retirees who want to draw down their portfolio in the most tax-efficient way they can.
If your situation is straightforward –a few index funds in a 401(k), a Roth IRA, no business interests, no large taxable account – you may not need this level of coordination, and I’ll tell you that. The work I do has the most value where the complexity is.
You won’t find performance claims, return projections, model portfolios, or specific security recommendations on this site, and you won’t get those from me in a meeting either. Those aren’t the right outputs from this kind of engagement. What you should expect instead is concrete, written analysis of how your investment decisions interact with your tax return, your estate plan, and your long-term goals – and recommendations you can take to your investment advisor, your CPA (if separate), and your other professionals.
I work out of Melville, NY and serve clients across Long Island, the five boroughs, and Westchester. The state-tax considerations described above apply to NY residents specifically; if you’re considering a move or already split between states, the planning gets more complicated and worth doing carefully.
If you have an investment advisor and a CPA but they’ve never met, that’s usually the first sign coordination is missing. Schedule a consultation and we’ll talk through where the gaps might be.
