Private-Client IPS, Tax-Aware, Estate & Goals-Based Planning

Learning objectives

By the end you can:

1. Write a complete private-client IPS: a return objective tied to the client's actual goals, a risk objective built from both ability and willingness to take risk, and the five constraints (time horizon, liquidity, tax circumstances, legal and regulatory, unique circumstances), for one Indian client and one US client, in language a reviewing colleague could execute without asking you a follow-up question.
2. Distinguish human capital from financial capital, compute the present value of a client's human capital as a growing annuity, and derive the equity weight a client's financial portfolio should carry given a target blended (whole-of-life) equity exposure, including recognizing the practical 100% ceiling that binds when the unconstrained math says more.
3. Build a goals-based financial plan: grouping a client's objectives into funding buckets, computing a funding ratio for each goal, and stating the glide path each bucket implies, while explicitly handing off the portfolio-construction machinery (liability-relative optimization, a goals-based MVO variant) to AA1.02 and any full Monte Carlo simulation build to the quant-code region.
4. Apply tax-aware investing: place assets in the account "wrapper" that suits their tax character (asset location), execute a tax-loss harvest correctly on both sides of the US wash-sale rule, and quantify the after-tax "tax alpha" a correct decision creates, in both the Indian and the US regime, each cited to its primary source.
5. State, precisely and with the underlying statute or regulation named, the core India-versus-US contrasts in capital-gains treatment, retirement-account architecture, and anti-avoidance rules (the US wash sale versus India's dividend/bonus-stripping provisions), and explain why a plan built for one market cannot be relabeled for the other.
6. Design a concentrated-position unwind plan: a staged sale with the tax arithmetic worked correctly, the insider-trading/compliance constraints named, and (referencing DV1.02–DV1.03 for the pricing mechanics, not re-deriving them) a collar's payoff bookkeeping, and reconcile the recommendation explicitly against this program's own concentration-over-diversification philosophy.
7. Plan retirement decumulation: state a withdrawal-rate heuristic and its known fragility, quantify sequence-of-returns risk by hand on two return paths with an identical arithmetic mean, and tie a withdrawal stream's money-weighted return to a hand-computed XIRR, across each market's decumulation architecture (US Required Minimum Distributions; India's NPS annuitization rule and its current lag against the Income Tax Act).
8. Sketch the core estate/wealth-transfer decision in each market, step-up in basis versus a lifetime gift in the US; carryover basis and the absence of an estate tax in India, with the headline numbers computed and cited.
9. (Productivity objective: R10 duality.) Use AI to accelerate first drafts of an IPS narrative and a tax/estate-rule summary, while running every fact through the Primary-Source Guardrail (AI0.01) before it reaches a client, and state, in your own words, why this is the region of the corpus with the single highest AI-over-trust risk.

The duality, stated once (R10). Objectives 1–8 are what the rubric certifies: you earn the gate by writing a defensible IPS and plan, by hand, with every number checked. Objective 9 is the productivity payoff you keep: AI drafts fast, but in this branch more than any other, a fluent draft that cites no primary source is not a first draft. It is a liability with good grammar.

Prerequisites & connections

Builds on. M6.04 (Behavioral Finance) supplies the temperament diagnosis this module's risk objective depends on: when a client's stated "risk tolerance" moves with the market, that is M6.04's recency bias and loss aversion talking, not a stable preference, and you should read a client's willingness answer through that module's bias catalog rather than take it at face value, this module does not re-teach the catalog; it uses it. M3.10 (Special Situations + Phase Capstone) is the reference for two specific tools this module needs but does not re-derive: its §4.6 sum-of-the-parts and holding-company-discount machinery, if a client's concentration sits inside a private holding structure rather than a single listed stock; and its §4.7 "equity as an option" framing, which is the exact lens for a founder holding illiquid, pre-liquidity equity in a company that has not yet had an exit event. E11.02 (M&A, Deals & Special Situations Lab) is the reference for the mechanics of the liquidity event itself, its §4.1 cash-vs-stock-consideration axis determines what a client actually receives and when it becomes sellable after an acquisition, and its treatment of lock-ups and vesting is exactly what precedes the concentrated-position problem this module picks up.