Ashley Murphy knows something about cross-border living. He’s a tri-citizen of the U.S., Australia and the U.K., and in 2013 founded Areté Wealth Strategists, a Minneapolis-based, fee-only financial planning and investment management firm serving Australian and American citizens, many of whom are expatriates. These days, he kind of typifies his client base in that he and his family in January relocated to Brisbane on Australia’s east coast, where they expect to remain until August of next year before returning to the U.S.
Meanwhile, technology enables him to operate two businesses that keep him anchored to the U.S.—Areté and the Global Financial Planning Institute, a platform he created last year to help financial advisors and other financial services professionals understand the nuances and potential pitfalls of working with cross-border clients.
The GFP Institute has an education component comprising a master class series of 10 weekly lessons on U.S. inbound/outbound international financial planning. Topics range from pre-immigration planning and tax treaties to retirement account transfers and international estate planning. Master class lessons include presentations from tax professionals, immigration attorneys and global insurance experts experienced in working with cross-border clients.
The master class is taught online via Zoom, and the completed coursework counts for 28 continuing education credits for the Certified Financial Planner designation.
Elsewhere, the GFP Institute’s website includes various tools and resources, such as tax calculators to figure out the exit tax imposed by the U.S. when people renounce their citizenship or surrender their green card. It also contains white papers and other research about international and cross-border financial planning issues. And, Murphy noted, it creates a community where people can come together to discuss matters pertaining to cross-border planning.
“The general misconception is that international and cross-border servicing of clients is a simple thing,” Murphy said. “The reason we started the master class is we want people to know about the immigration process, the exit tax and passive foreign investment companies, how estate planning differs, and how to claim social security from overseas.”
He said he was motivated to create the GFP Institute based on his own experience when he came to the U.S. from Australia more than 15 years ago. “There was no website or advisory organizations who could help expats,” he explained, adding that after he became a certified financial planner he got involved in an informal, cross-border group with other advisors that he felt left a lot to be desired.
From The Ground Up
Creating the GFP Institute from scratch was a hefty endeavor involving both intellectual capital and financial capital. That included procuring the necessary software and hardware to host the community; finding guest speakers and paying their fees; and hiring people to develop the curriculum. Then they had to market the program.
The program was developed with assistance from two Ph.D. candidates with knowledge of financial planning and taxes—one came from Kansas State University and the other from Griffith University in Australia. Another key member of the curriculum development team was Matt Goren, who is both the director of curriculum at the GFP Institute and a professor of financial planning at the American College of Financial Services.
“What I effectively did was take the model that we already have at the American College and apply it at the GFP Institute,” Goren said. “So we’ve got the 10 lessons and the final exam. We’re mimicking what we know works and seems to do very well for our students.
“In terms of developing the meat of the program with actual content, we were fortunate that Ashley has been researching this stuff for like a decade,” Goren continued. “He has an enormous database, maybe more than anybody else has. Once we designed the program structure we wanted, we knew what topics we wanted to cover and then went through the database and pulled out the information that would inform that specific content.”
He noted that he, Murphy and the two Ph.D. students spent about a half-year putting together the lessons. Then they ran the content by various subject matter experts. In some cases, these experts spotted things that could be improved to meet the needs of real-world applications.
“In total, you have at least a dozen people who worked on putting together the content,” Goren said. “We tried to capture everything under the sun when it comes to cross-border advising. That was pretty tough because when you think about the CFP program there are already textbooks written and a CFP exam. With us, we built this program from the ground up.”