Same holdings.Different outcome.
What you own is allocation. Where you own it is location. The same assets produce a different after-tax result depending on which account holds them. Over decades, that gap compounds into a number that is hard to ignore.
Every dollar has a home.The address changes what it keeps.
Most portfolios spread across three kinds of accounts, each taxed on its own terms. The decision that quietly moves the number is which asset you put in which one.
Brokerage accounts
Gains and income are taxed as they happen. Best suited to tax-efficient holdings that produce little annual drag, so the account is not handing the IRS a bill every year.
401(k), traditional IRA
Income compounds untaxed until withdrawal, when it is taxed as ordinary income. Generally the right home for bonds and high-income assets whose yield would otherwise be taxed every year.
Roth accounts
Growth is never taxed again. Generally the most valuable real estate you own, which is why the highest-growth assets often belong here rather than anywhere else.
A simplified view. Which asset belongs where depends on your accounts, your bracket, and your timeline. This is not tax advice.
The more you make.The more location costs you.
Location matters most where the tax rates are highest and the accounts are messiest, which describes almost every high earner. A top marginal bracket turns a small annual tax drag into a large one. Concentrated employer stock sits in a taxable account with a low basis and years of unrealized gain. Equity comp arrives on the company’s schedule, not yours.
The accounts rarely talk to each other. A brokerage account here, an old 401(k) there, a Roth someone opened once, a new plan at the current employer. Each was set up for its own reason, at its own time, and no one has looked at them as a single portfolio. The higher your income, the more accounts accumulate, and the more the uncoordinated version quietly costs.
The instinct is that high earners have this handled. Often the opposite is true. More income and more accounts mean more room for the location decision to go unmade.
Nobody owns the board.That is the gap we work in.
Location falls between two desks. Investment advisors optimize allocation, because tax is not their job. They hand you a package in March and move on. Accountants file what happened, because investments are not their job. Neither one is positioned to make the location decision, so it goes unmade.
We built the firm to sit in that gap. Every portfolio decision runs through a tax lens, and every account is looked at as one portfolio rather than a drawer of unrelated statements. Location is not a footnote to the work. It is the work.
The analysis maps every account you hold, then places each asset where it keeps the most after tax. Same holdings, coordinated. That is the difference location makes.
We map it.You keep more.
The analysis looks at every account you hold and places each asset where it keeps the most after tax. No sales pitch, no follow-up sequence. Thirty minutes with Shaun and Jordan.
Book a 30-Minute Call30 min · ComplimentaryWith Shaun Eck and Jordan Frenkel