Hoxton

2025 Journal

Summary of call with George Stainton:

Summary of Our Discussion

• You and Sarah have now permanently relocated from the US to the UK with your two boys and have given up your US Green Cards.
• You’ve sold your US property, with the proceeds currently sitting in cash within your Fidelity brokerage account.
• Assets:
• UK main residence worth ~£1.8m with a £650k mortgage.
• London rental property worth ~£700k with a £200k mortgage.
• ~$2.6m in your Fidelity brokerage, mostly held in cash (proceeds from Microsoft stock and home sale).
• Fidelity 401(k) of around $400k.
• Has with around $50k.
• Several UK pensions, with the main pot worth approximately £230k, yet to be consolidated or reviewed.
• You are currently between roles, doing some advisory work with start-ups, while Sarah works within the family business. A £450k lump sum from the business is expected in due course.
• You are both seeking clarity, simplicity, and structure around your global finances — ensuring your cash and investments are working efficiently toward your longer-term goals.
• Retirement location and timeline are still open, though you plan to remain in the UK at least until Ollie goes to university.

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Key Gaps & Planning Opportunities

From our initial discussion, a few key areas stand out for further analysis:

1. US Estate Exposure – Now that you’ve given up your Green Card, any US-situs assets (including those held with Fidelity) may still be subject to US estate tax on death. We can explore restructuring these assets to mitigate this exposure.
2. 401(k) Rollover – Your 401(k) is currently with a US provider that’s not well suited to non-US residents. We can look at rolling this into a compliant IRA, giving you flexibility, multi-currency control, and ongoing management.
3. Cash Utilisation – You have a significant cash position, currently not generating meaningful returns. We can design a structured investment and liquidity plan that balances safety, access, and inflation protection across GBP and USD holdings.
4. Currency Management – With assets spread between USD and GBP, it’s important to manage FX risk proactively, especially as your long-term expenses are now GBP-based.
5. UK Inheritance Tax Planning – With UK domicile re-established, IHT exposure on your global estate should be factored in early. Strategies such as life cover, trusts, or offshore investment wrappers can be used to reduce this future liability.
6. Pension Consolidation & Alignment – Tidying up your various UK pension pots and aligning them with your long-term investment strategy will simplify oversight and improve efficiency.

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About Hoxton Wealth

Hoxton Wealth is an independent, cross-border financial advisory firm specialising in expatriate and globally mobile clients. We operate under multiple regulatory frameworks (FCA, SEC, CySEC), giving us the ability to manage UK and US-linked assets efficiently across jurisdictions.

As one of Hoxton’s senior advisers, my role focuses specifically on clients with US/UK ties—helping them simplify their structures, consolidate accounts, manage currency exposure, and design long-term, tax-efficient investment strategies that adapt as they move between countries.

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Next Steps

The next stage is a financial planning fact-find call, where we’ll build a deeper understanding of your income, expenses, goals, and risk preferences.

Following this, I’ll prepare a tailored financial plan showing how best to:

• Structure and invest your cash holdings,
• Optimise your retirement and investment accounts,
• Reduce tax exposure on both sides of the Atlantic, and
• Build a clear, ongoing wealth management strategy.

I’ll send you:

• A link to our Wealth Management Portal (for secure document upload and portfolio access), and
• The Fact-Find and Risk Assessment forms to complete ahead of our call.
• I’ve also attached a few guides that touch on asset protection and planing with US retirement accounts.

2025 Journal

Summary of call with George Stainton:

Summary of Our Conversation

We explored your current position, objectives and priorities now that you’ve returned to the UK. Your three core goals are clear:

1. Simplicity – reducing the number of institutions, accounts and moving pieces across your financial landscape.
2. Re-centring finances in the UK – where appropriate, consolidating and repatriating assets from the US into an efficient UK structure.
3. Tax-efficient implementation – ensuring any moves (especially from the US) are structured sensibly to avoid unnecessary tax.

We also covered your intention for the assets to work long-term, with a moderately-aggressive investment approach, relying on employment income for day-to-day living while allowing investments to grow toward retirement.

We discussed early thinking around retirement spending, trust and inheritance considerations, the potential for future gifting, and how the new UK FIG regime can create a tax-efficient window to crystallise US-based gains when returning to the UK. This aligns well with your current lower-income period and the ability to use more favourable US long-term capital gains rates.

Finally, we reviewed next steps toward pulling your planning together, including the role your risk assessment and investment statements will play in building the advice.

Next Steps For You & Sarah:

• Clarify a realistic retirement income target
• Sit together and refine what you would genuinely need in today’s terms, once school fees and other temporary costs fall away.
• Upload investment statements
• Please upload the following to the portal so I can run analysis before our next call:
• Fidelity brokerage statements (equities + bonds)
• Fidelity 401(k)
• UK ISAs
• Any UK pension statements you currently have
• Check GBP withdrawal process with Fidelity (US)
• Confirm whether GBP balances can be withdrawn to the UK directly or must first be converted back to USD.
• Complete the Risk Assessment
• This is waiting for you on your portal dashboard as a pending task.

For My Side:

Before our next meeting, I will:

• Complete deep-dive modelling on how best to bring assets into the UK Tax-efficiently (including FIG planning and sequencing).
• Review investment structures, retirement modelling, and potential trust/estate strategies.
• Build your tailored advice presentation for the 4th December meeting.

If anything else comes to mind before then, feel free to reach out. Wishing you and the family a great couple of weeks — and thank you again for the thoughtful and open discussion yesterday. Looking forward to speaking on the 4th. 

Kind regards,