How to Share Ownership Without Losing Control #
You want to start transferring wealth to your kids or setting up inheritance structures, but you’re not ready to hand over the keys. Smart. The good news is you can add family members to your LLC or trust right now while keeping complete decision-making authority. The structure matters more than most people realize.
With an LLC, you stay on as the manager. That’s the role that makes decisions, signs contracts, and controls operations. Your family members get membership interests, but you can issue those as non-voting units. They own a piece, they get distributions if you decide to make them, but they can’t override your choices or force a sale. It’s your show until you decide otherwise.
Trusts work differently but accomplish the same goal. You set up the trust, fund it with assets, and name beneficiaries who will eventually receive everything. But as trustee (or by naming someone you completely trust), you control when and how distributions happen. Your kids might be beneficiaries on paper, but you’re still deciding whether they get income now, principal later, or nothing until you’re gone. The trust document is everything here. Bad drafting means fighting with your own estate plan.
The tax piece gets interesting fast. If you gift LLC interests or put assets into an irrevocable trust, you’re using your lifetime gift tax exemption. Right now that’s substantial, but it changes with law updates. Gifts remove assets from your taxable estate, which matters if you’re anywhere near estate tax thresholds. But you give up that stepped-up basis your heirs would get if they inherited instead. Sometimes paying estate tax is cheaper than the capital gains hit your family takes on appreciated assets you gifted years ago.
This is where working with a registered investment advisor who actually operates as a fiduciary starts paying off. Broker-dealers can sell you products. Fiduciary advisors have to put your interests first, period. That difference shows up in how they structure these plans. Digital Wealth Partners provides wealth management services and financial planning under fiduciary standards, which means the advice isn’t tilted toward what earns a commission.
For families with serious complexity (multiple businesses, real estate holdings, trusts across generations), a family office makes sense. You’re not just managing investments anymore. You need someone coordinating tax strategy with your CPA, estate planning with your attorney, and making sure the trust distributions don’t accidentally disqualify someone from a planned Medicaid strategy five years out. Family offices handle multi-generational planning, succession for family businesses, and philanthropic structures that actually accomplish what you want.
Here’s what gets expensive: waiting until your assets have grown before you transfer them. If you gift LLC interests when the company is worth $2 million versus $20 million, you’ve just saved a fortune in gift taxes or freed up exemption space for other transfers. The same logic applies to trusts. Fund them early, let them appreciate outside your estate.
Asset custody matters too, especially once you’re coordinating between investment accounts, business holdings, and trust assets. You want a registered investment advisor who can custody assets properly and keep everything visible in one place. Digital Wealth Partners handles that custody piece alongside investment advisory, so you’re not chasing statements from six different institutions.
The control question really comes down to documents. Your LLC operating agreement and trust documents need to be written specifically for what you want. Generic templates don’t cut it when you’re trying to thread the needle between transferring wealth and maintaining authority. A family office can coordinate all of this, make sure your estate attorney is talking to your wealth advisor, and confirm the tax implications make sense before you sign anything.
Contact Digital Ascension Group to learn how our family office services can coordinate your complete financial picture, from business succession and estate planning to investment management and tax strategy across generations.
