By Josh Gottlieb
With more than 60 years of experience in asset management and wealth retention, this is the most exciting program that I can imagine that we could ever find. WATER℠ — the Wealth Accumulation Trust Enhancing Returns℠ — is a breakthrough for us and for clients.
Since 1974, I've been living in the world professionally of life insurance, pensions and retirement planning. Part of this whole outside the box, “outside the nine dots” thinking that is rampant through everything we do is looking at things in a different way, doing incredible amounts of diligence and research; finding people we can around the world that are the smartest in their disciplines. This was no different. We have found breakthroughs in the world of planning, wealth retention, asset management and asset protection with WATER℠ that don't exist anywhere else.
Michael Goldstein and I, between us, have spent more than 100 years in the world of pensions and qualified and non-qualified plans. We realized WATER℠ is at its root a pension plan with these incredible tax attributes that every wealthy client would want to use.
When I look at wealth and wealth development and wealth protection and transferring wealth, the perfect environment is if I could put my assets into a structure where there are no taxes and I'm making pure investment decisions; not decisions that are driven by what might happen with taxes later. When I have the assets in a class that's exempt from creditors, I make different decisions — and it's pretty exciting.
I can contribute assets in an unlimited amount into this trust. I don't have a target on my back by the IRS because I'm creating too big of a deduction. Those assets are now exempt from creditors. They are growing tax-free. One of the things I can do that I can't do in any other instrument that I'm aware of is I can contribute assets to this trust that are appreciated, and it doesn't trigger a tax when I move this into the trust.
In the past half century, we've dealt with some of the wealthiest families in the world, privately held businesses and their owners, large public companies. What we're doing with WATER℠ is not changing what they're investing in. We're not suggesting they give up anything that they have, but rather we're able to put them in a position where they can take existing investments, assets they've already decided on and keep more of it.
If all we do is allow our clients to move their assets into a safer, more highly productive environment — that's extraordinary. It happens there are also methods of how you get money out of this that are incredibly efficient. And we have now validated this with some of the smartest people in the world on issues of tax, asset protection and pensions. WATER℠ gives us this incredible opportunity to deliver on all of those promises.
Joshua A. Gottlieb is the Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of The Gottlieb Organization.