Sterk Resources Spotlight: R. Lloyd & Co.

Lloyd: When it comes to investing their money, people don’t necessarily know what to do, and don’t know who they can trust. We used to refer other people to brokers like Merrill Lynch, for example. And I just thought those people weren’t doing as good of a job as they could be. I thought, “I can do this.”

So I started offering the service to clients and it’s grown since then. If we’ve been doing their taxes for 25 years, people feel like they can trust us to manage their money.

Lloyd: My approach with divorce is: Let’s agree to disagree. Let’s be compatible enough that we don’t do stupid things financially. Let’s agree to file joint tax returns until we’re divorced. Let’s divide the assets in the most tax effective way.

If you have children, you have to make peace enough to do the smartest things financially. Otherwise you’re just going to make the situation worse. We don’t try to be counselors, or salvage the relationship in any way, but we will try to at least have them be agreeable enough to not do financially stupid things. When it comes to tax issues like claiming the children or college expenses, or how to divide the mortgage interest, we always say the one we’re looking to hurt most is the government. Let’s focus on that.

Lloyd: We’re not attorneys so we don’t draft trusts. What we can do is sit down with you to decide what it is you want to accomplish, and then lay out a roadmap to take to an attorney. “Here’s what the client wants to accomplish. This is the net result that we want to achieve.” 

I’ve gone through a couple of situations where one spouse has dementia pretty bad. There are Medicare trusts you can set up so that one spouse can receive Medicaid without financially killing the other spouse. 

That’s an example of something we can help clients figure out to take to their attorney to draft the actual document.

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