Libretto and Dimensional Fund Advisors to Host Five Ultra High Net Worth Workshops

I’m looking forward to collaborating with Dimensional Fund Advisors this fall to bring our Ultra High Net Worth Workshop to the Dimensional community. We have five events planned:

• Orange County - 9/10
• Boise - 11/3
• Portland - 11/4
• Seattle - 11/5
• Charlotte - 12/8 & 12/9

The workshops are focused on advising ultra-high-net-worth families, which I’ll loosely define as families with more than $20 million in liquid wealth.

But I want to make one point upfront: these methods are not only for $20 million-plus families. In many ways, they are even more important for clients below that threshold, because those clients have less room for error. The complexity changes with wealth, but the need for thoughtful, integrated advice does not. So if you have the opportunity to join us, I’d encourage you to attend even if moving into the ultra-affluent market is not your primary objective.

Request an invitation

About Jeff

Before founding Libretto, I spent more than 25 years as an investment advisor, much of it working with ultra-affluent families.

I’ve also been part of the Dimensional community for a long time. I started using Dimensional funds with clients in 1996, and in 2000 I had the opportunity to collaborate with Ken French and the Dimensional research team on the development of the original core strategies. I’ve lectured for Ken French’s and Bob Merton’s MBA classes as well, and I have a great appreciation for Dimensional’s contribution to investment thinking and the advice profession.

My typical client ranged from about $20 million to families worth more than $1 billion. At that level, the challenge was not simply building a better portfolio. It was organizing a much broader financial structure: private businesses, real estate, alternative investments, liabilities, estate planning, tax considerations, insurance, and family objectives. There were few tools designed to do that work in an integrated way, so I built my own. It started with spreadsheets and ultimately became Libretto.

My motivation for founding Libretto was to take the methods I had developed for very affluent families and make them scalable for advisors serving a much broader range of clients. Software is one part of that. Education is another. These workshops are an opportunity to share the underlying framework directly with the advisor community.

What you’ll learn

The core idea is simple: move from managing a client’s portfolio to managing the client’s total wealth.

As clients become more affluent, more of their financial lives sit outside the liquid portfolio: human capital, real estate, private businesses, estate inflows, liabilities, and more. Good advice has to account for those pieces together. In that context, I like to think of the investment portfolio as a “completion fund” - flexible capital designed to fill the gaps left by the rest of the client’s financial structure.

Comprehensive advice also becomes harder as the number of moving parts increases. The answer, in my view, is not necessarily to build every capability in-house. We’ll discuss a virtual family office model in which the advisor leads the strategy and coordinates outside specialists around the client’s broader financial structure.

By the end, I hope attendees have a clearer framework for serving more affluent families without redesigning their practices, as well as ideas they can apply across their full client base.

An overview of the sessions

We have five sessions planned for each day. Each addresses a different part of the same question: how do you deliver more sophisticated, integrated advice without making the practice itself unnecessarily complicated?

A Framework for Managing Ultra-Affluent Clients. Differentiation starts with advice. In this session, I’ll discuss how a stronger advice framework can sharpen an advisor’s value proposition, support organic growth, and create a more credible story when competing upmarket.

Beyond the Portfolio. A client’s portfolio is only one part of their financial life. We’ll look at how advisors can manage the broader wealth structure and connect planning, investing, and risk management into one coherent process. We’ll also explore what that shift means for the investment portfolio and for the advisor’s role as a wealth architect.

Mission Driven Multi-Generational Strategies. At very high levels of wealth, the conversation often shifts from “Do I have enough?” to “What is this wealth for?” We’ll look at how advisors can bring structure to complex family systems by connecting wealth allocation, household needs, multi-generational priorities, and family mission.

Demystifying Alternatives. Alternatives are popular in the ultra-affluent market, but access is not the same thing as advice. In my view, being able to explain what drives returns, where the risks sit, and how an alternative fits into the client’s total wealth is more powerful and differentiating than simply offering access to every client who asks.

Pulling it All Together. In the final session, we’ll bring the framework together: liability-driven investing, the role of the investment portfolio as a completion fund, personalized risk management, and the virtual family office operating model. The goal is to show how the same underlying process can serve clients ranging from relatively straightforward to highly complex.

How you can join

If you’re a member of the Dimensional community and live in one of the cities we’re visiting, send your Dimensional Regional Director an email asking about the workshop, or reach out to us using the button below.

Request an invitation

If you can’t attend one of the workshops, we’ve also organized a one-hour CE credit webinar covering the high-level concepts. Everyone is welcome, and you can register below.

Register for our UHNW CE credit webinar

I hope to see you at one of the workshops.