Holistic Planning for Your Lifetime and Across Generations

Helping you understand and maximize the full value of your family by aligning financial, human, and legacy goals, while honoring your family’s unique values.

Holistic Planning for Your Lifetime and Across Generations

Holistic Planning for Your Lifetime and Across Generations

Helping you understand and maximize the full value of your family by aligning financial, human, and legacy goals, while honoring your family’s unique values.

Meeting Your Family’s Needs with Established Solutions

Wealthy families like the Rothschilds and the Rockefellers realized long ago that their affairs were complex and they needed more than casual help from their accountants or lawyers. As a result, they established permanent “family offices” and hired professionals to manage their finances.

These families needed professionals who knew tax planning, investment management, budgeting, accounting, estate planning, bookkeeping, and more, and the same need exists today.

Kerr Family Office provides a comprehensive suite of in-depth, personalized financial services to our most successful Canadian families. We take ownership of all your family priorities and deadlines with you, maintain all of your records, and take care of all your family members’ needs so you feel confident in meeting your current and long-term financial goals.

Full Service Family Office Wealth Management

The objective of our Full Service Family Office Wealth Management is to help you understand and maximize the true value of your family, which is the sum of its human, social, and intellectual capital facilitated by your financial capital.

The team at Kerr Family Office does this by maximizing your financial resources through integrated planning, providing peace of mind that financial opportunities and priorities are being taken care of, and helping you articulate your family values to create the best financial and non-financial legacy for the next generation.

Your family can rely on a dedicated, multidisciplinary team of professionals led by a Family Office Partner to promote continuity of service. We follow our proprietary Kerr Family Office Process, which, at its core, is guided by a detailed understanding and articulation of your family’s goals and values.

Family Governance and Engagement

Family Meetings • Family Governance Structures • Financial Literacy Programs • Succession Planning • Philanthropy and Social Impact • Family Communication Plans • Generational Transition Coaching • Wealth Education for Younger Generations

To grow and preserve family wealth for multiple generations, families should develop effective ways to make decisions together while preparing the next generation to manage the family wealth. Depending on the family’s situation and objectives, we can develop a program of family meetings to share information and decisions. We can also help assess and address the educational needs of younger members of the family so they have the financial literacy necessary to act as financial stewards.

Investment Planning & Management

Investment design & Asset Allocation • Investment Manager Selection • Tax Effective Portfolio Construction • Custodial Arrangement • Merged Accounting Verification • Performance Calculation and Comparison • Ongoing Monitoring & Review

Through Kerr Financial Advisors Inc (KFA) our Family Office Investment Planning & Management process starts with developing a strategic Investment Policy for your family’s assets. From there, we:

  • Create an asset allocation plan incorporating a wide range of securities, including alternative asset classes.
  • Select the best specialty managers and strategies suitable to implement the policy, incorporating an institutional due diligence process to select and monitor the managers and with special attention to managers that pair well together to optimize risk adjusted returns.
  • Consolidate feeds from the many custodial platforms involved to give you a consolidated overview of the family’s portfolio.

In your strategic framework, adjustments are made as needed or as opportunities arise based on changes in market conditions, goals, and needs. We also focus on effectively managing the overall portfolio through wise asset location choices and carefully considering when and where taxable income is generated.

Family Discovery Process

Articulate Family Goals • Clarify Family Resources • Align on objectives

The Family Office service starts with getting to know you and your family. We begin our discovery process by:

  • Asking questions about your primary issues and concerns
  • Meeting with you and your extended family
  • Listening carefully and learning as much as we can about you and your family

From this in-depth learning and analysis, we articulate your family goals, clarify your family resources, and align on your objectives, allowing us to advise you in the most meaningful and personal way.

Articulate Family Values

Facilitate Family Discussions on Core Values • Identify Shared Values Across Generations • Create a Family Values Statement • Align Values with Business and Investment Goals • Integrate Values into Philanthropic Planning • Communicate Values Across Generations • Embed Values into Governance and Decision-Making Processes

From the wealth creators to the wealth inheritors, each generation grew up under different circumstances, which shaped family members’ perspectives on life and values. Articulating the values most important to your family is what brings your family together across generations, as it provides a framework for each family member to act in any given situation. Plus, a system of shared values often drives the success of family businesses and offices.

Without commonality in values, succession planning, budgeting, investing, and family direction are difficult. Kerr Family Office can guide you through this process and help you confirm your family’s values, instilling them in the work we do and helping you to communicate them across generations. This is a particularly valuable process in the work we do with families around their philanthropic planning.

Integrated Planning

Family Risk Management • Succession & Estate Planning • Tax Planning • Strategic Family Philanthropy • Optimal Tax & Income Structure • Education Funding • Action Plans

With our deep level of technical expertise through our diversified, professionally designated team, we can integrate our services to help ensure that your strategies combine to complement and enhance each other’s effectiveness. We have extensive experience advising clients on advanced strategies, including the use of holding companies, trusts, and business succession. Our comprehensive integrated planning includes family risk management, succession and estate planning, tax planning, education funding, strategic family philanthropy and considering optimal ownership, tax and income structures.

Proactive Monitoring & Administration Services

Corporate & Trust Tax Services • Tax Estimates & Instalments • Annual Optimization of Taxable Income by Entity • Financial Statement Preparation • Cash Flow & Budgeting • Bill Payment & Banking • Maintenance of Family Records • Tax Return Preparation (Canadian & US) • Implementation of Planning Strategies • Proactive Advice & Consultation

An important part of our service is ensuring that your family stays on top of all priorities, that deadlines are met and that you take advantage of all new opportunities as they arise. To do this, we develop an Annual Calendar for your family that tracks all of your deadlines and builds in regular meetings. At the outset of each year, we review your family’s strategic objectives for the year and risk areas to be addressed, and we keep these top of mind in our regular meetings. Additionally, we take care of all your ongoing tax filing and administration needs from our internal teams, allowing us to monitor the effectiveness of all strategies on an ongoing basis.

Family Philanthropy

Develop a Charitable Giving Strategy • Establish a Family Foundation • Align Philanthropy with Family Values • Create a Planned Giving Program • Facilitate Family Discussions on Community Involvement • Engage the Next Generation in Philanthropy • Optimize Giving for Tax Efficiency

Two of the most important assets for a family are your relationships and experiences with each other and your connection with your community (sometimes referred to as Human Capital and Social Capital). When families have been fortunate to build wealth, they often find it rewarding to focus on the purpose of the wealth, including how they can give back to their communities, and enrich their own experiences by doing so. Our experience with families in this regard, and with our own charitable giving and community involvement, allows us to help your family make informed decisions when it comes to giving. Depending on your goals and objectives, we can work with you to set up a charitable foundation or a planned giving strategy that aligns with your family’s values and is tax effective.

Meet Our Team

Meet our qualified teams of professional advisors across our Toronto and Montreal offices and our related group of companies.

Contact Us

Discover how Kerr Financial’s range of services can help you achieve your financial goals.

Frequently Asked Questions

Kerr Family Office is designed for families with significant multi-generational investment assets who seek comprehensive wealth management. We offer tailored solutions that integrate financial, human, and legacy planning to ensure your family’s wealth and values are preserved across generations.
  • Access to a personalized dedicated team of multi-disciplinary professionals
  • Objective financial advice and access to all investment managers (not pre conceived solutions)
  • Confidentiality and discretion
  • Administration of family financial affairs made easy from one location, including storage of confidential documents
  • Integration of tax, investment and estate planning strategies to optimize family results
  • Peace of mind that all compliance needs are taken care of and opportunities are not being missed
  • Access to best practices based on our experience with other successful families like yours
  • Experience and sensitivity to ways families can truly sustain their wealth (family education, governance, succession planning, articulation of values and helping you consider the purpose of the family wealth)
No. Family offices are all very different and customized to each family’s unique situation. The services are personalized based on the family’s objectives and needs in order to provide services and education which meet the family’s long term values, goals and objectives. Kerr Family Office services are customized during the Family Discovery Process and updated regularly to meet the diverse needs of the families we serve.
Today, more and more successful families are being overwhelmed by the sheer extent and complexity of their financial lives. The more complex your financial situation, the more you may need the services of a family office. Where you are selling a business and are faced with complicated decisions regarding tax, legal and financial management, a family office could handle these issues. If you are looking to build generational continuity using family trusts, philanthropy and estate planning, a family office would allow you to address all those challenges and more. The Kerr Family Office concept is the ideal solution for obtaining complete financial management from a highly qualified dedicated team of professionals.
A family office is a dedicated multi disciplinary team of professionals who look after your family’s complex financial and human capital needs. The family office oversees and manages all of your financial affairs and maintains all of your financial information and records. It provides customized services to several generations of your family and works to support the family to sustain and grow family wealth.

Designed to deliver essential financial guidance to next-generation clients in the wealth building phase

Providing holistic financial planning and customized advisory services to successful Canadians