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A Fiduciary Statement

We are a fee-only firm. We do not sell products, we do not accept trail commission, and we have no sales targets of any kind. Our single obligation is to the client whose capital we advise. Every recommendation we make — whether to act, to wait, or to do nothing at all — is made under that standard, and documented under that standard, and paid for under that standard. We believe this is the only honest way for a private wealth firm to operate in Ireland.

Finn Kelleher
Finn Kelleher Managing Director · Kelleher Wealth Ltd
Authorised & regulated by the Central Bank of Ireland · Ref. C-198423
§ 01 — Clients

Who we work with

Around eighty Irish households, most of whom have worked with us for more than eight years. Broadly, they arrive at one of three moments in a financial life.

Business owners near sale or exit

You have spent twenty or thirty years building an Irish private company, and you are now eighteen months — or six months — from selling it. The question is no longer how to grow the business. The question is how the proceeds, once they land in your personal account, translate into a life that does not require you to ever run a payroll again.

We work closely with your corporate advisors (usually the tax partner and the M&A lawyer) from the moment the term sheet is being drafted. We are not the deal team; we are the team that makes sure the capital you walk away with is structured correctly the day after completion — retirement relief claimed properly, deferred consideration understood, shareholder loans unwound, pension lump sums taken at the right moment, and a plan in place for the capital itself before the first wire settles.

Most of this work happens quietly over a twelve to twenty-four month window on either side of the sale. It is not about market timing; it is about not losing years of progress to tax mistakes or concentration risk at the single most important moment of your financial life.

Senior professionals with mature pensions

You are fifty-five to sixty-eight, a partner or senior executive, and you have accumulated multiple pension pots over a long career — an executive pension from a current employer, one or two deferred occupational schemes from earlier roles, perhaps a personal retirement bond, and a PRSA or two. On paper it is several million euro. In practice it is scattered across four or five life offices on three different platforms with nobody in charge of it.

We begin by consolidating what should be consolidated and leaving alone what should not be (some older schemes carry guaranteed annuity rates or protected tax-free cash that must not be disturbed). We then build a withdrawal plan that pairs an ARF, a vested PRSA, and — for a small portion — an annuity, so that the floor of your retirement income does not depend on markets and the rest is free to grow for the next twenty or thirty years.

This is not about picking funds. It is about ordering the components so that tax, cash-flow, and risk are all being managed by one hand instead of five.

Families handling inheritance

A parent has died, or is very clearly approaching the end of life, and a meaningful estate is about to move between generations. Often the adult children are themselves in their fifties, running their own businesses and households, and have never had anyone to talk to about capital of this size. We sit with the family — usually all of them, sometimes including the surviving spouse — and work through what is actually arriving, what the Capital Acquisitions Tax exposure looks like, and whether any planning is still possible before the estate settles.

After the estate settles, we build out a long-horizon plan for the capital: what stays invested, what funds lifestyle, what is held liquid, and what (if anything) is gifted down another generation using the small-gift exemption and the Group A threshold. A lot of this work is quietly reassuring the family that the capital is not about to evaporate, and that there is a calm plan in place.

We are comfortable working with solicitors, tax advisors, and accountants already involved. We do not displace them; we run the financial side of the plan between them.

§ 02 — Advice

What we do

Six quiet disciplines. Each one is an entire professional practice elsewhere; here they are run by the same pair of hands, so that decisions taken in one do not quietly undo decisions taken in another.

I — Retirement

Retirement & pension planning

The planning work that begins twenty years before retirement and does not end at the drawdown date. We model funding, tax-free lump sum strategy, the interplay between Occupational Pension Schemes, PRSAs, ARFs and vested PRSAs, and the Standard Fund Threshold where it applies.

When you are already retired, we manage the income strategy across multiple wrappers so that tax, sequence-of-returns risk, and longevity are addressed by the same plan rather than by three separate providers.

Typical clients — age 48 through late 70s

II — Portfolio

Investment portfolio management

We build diversified, low-cost, globally-listed portfolios — mostly UCITS index and factor funds — matched to a written investment policy statement for each household. We do not run model portfolios, we do not rebalance on calendars, and we have no in-house funds.

Our job is to keep costs low, tax reporting honest, and to prevent the two mistakes that cost private investors decades of return: taking too much risk at peaks, and abandoning the plan at troughs. Much of the work is quiet, patient, and boring by design.

Liquid assets advised — typically €500k – €5M

III — Estate

Estate planning & inheritance

Planning the orderly transfer of wealth to spouses, children, and grandchildren using Irish Capital Acquisitions Tax rules, the Group A, B and C thresholds, the small-gift exemption, and Section 72 / Section 73 life assurance. We work in concert with your solicitor on wills, enduring powers of attorney, and the family trust structures that matter in larger estates.

The planning is specific and the arithmetic is concrete. The goal is simply that when the estate eventually moves, it moves in the way you decided it should — not in the way the default rules would move it.

Coordinated with existing solicitor and tax advisor

IV — Tax-Efficient

Tax-efficient savings

Structuring non-pension savings so that long-term compounding is not quietly eroded by the wrong wrapper. That means using pensions up to the appropriate limits, using EIIS where appropriate and within a client's risk capacity, and choosing between life assurance investments, unit trusts, and direct securities accounts with the Irish tax treatment of each option explicitly on the table.

This is rarely the glamorous part of the plan. It is one of the parts that quietly compounds the most.

Reviewed annually against current Revenue thresholds

V — Protection

Business protection

For owner-managers and shareholding directors: keyperson cover, co-director and partnership protection, shareholder buy-back planning, and the cross-option agreements that make sure an unexpected death does not become a second crisis on top of the first one.

We quote across the Irish market, we recommend on need, and — because we take no commission — the recommendation is not coloured by which provider pays us more. Any commission paid by the life office is credited against your fee in full.

Reviewed alongside your company's annual accounts

VI — Pre-Exit

Pre-exit & post-sale capital planning

The specific, twenty-four-month window on either side of a business sale. Working with your tax and legal advisors, we make sure Retirement Relief, Entrepreneur Relief, and the pension-lump sum are all claimed correctly; that deferred consideration and earn-out elements are accounted for; and that the proceeds, once they arrive, are structured into a plan from day one rather than parked in a deposit account while you decide what to do next.

It is the highest-stakes piece of work most of our clients ever ask us to do. It is also the piece we care about most.

Engagements begin 12–24 months pre-sale

§ 03 — Fees

Fees & how we are paid

Written out in plain English, without euphemism, because the way a firm is paid is the single strongest predictor of the advice it gives.

We charge fixed retainer fees, agreed in advance. Most household retainers fall between €1,800 and €6,000 a year depending on complexity — number of wrappers, number of entities, whether pre-exit planning is live, and whether the household has international tax exposure.

We do not take trail commission. If you hold an existing life office policy, pension, or ARF that pays a trail commission to whoever advised on it, we will rebate that trail to you in full or arrange for it to be paid back into the policy as a premium top-up. We are not paid twice for the same work.

Your first meeting with us is complimentary. It takes about ninety minutes. We look at your current position, explain how we would propose to work, and quote a fixed fee for the following twelve months. If you would prefer not to proceed, no invoice is raised.

One-off pieces of work — a retirement strategy review, a business protection structuring, a pre-sale plan — are quoted on a fixed-fee basis in advance. You will not receive an invoice you did not expect.

§ 04 — Regulatory

How we are regulated

The protections that sit around your engagement with any Irish private wealth firm. We set them out here in full, because they matter.

Central Bank

Authorisation

Kelleher Wealth Ltd is authorised and regulated by the Central Bank of Ireland as an Investment Intermediary and Insurance Intermediary.

Reference no. C-198423
PI Insurance

Professional indemnity

Professional indemnity cover is held with an A-rated insurer at a level that meets or exceeds the minimum required under S.I. No. 60 of 2007 (Investment Intermediaries Act, as amended).

Renewed annually — 01 March
Ombudsman

FSPO

If you are dissatisfied with any aspect of the service we provide, you have the right to refer your complaint to the Financial Services and Pensions Ombudsman of Ireland after exhausting our own complaints procedure.

fspo.ie — Lincoln House, D02 VH29
Compensation

Investor Compensation Scheme

Clients of Kelleher Wealth are covered by the Investor Compensation Scheme established under the Investor Compensation Act 1998, subject to the limits set out in that legislation.

Administered by the ICCL
§ 05 — Principal

Finn Kelleher

Founded the firm in 2008 and has been its sole fee-earning advisor ever since. The client roster is capped, deliberately, at what one experienced advisor can know properly.

Finn Kelleher studied economics at University College Dublin and spent the first seven years of his career inside AIB Private Banking, from 2001 through 2007, advising business owners and senior professionals. By the end of that period he had qualified as a QFA, as a Certified Financial Planner, and was working toward a diploma in tax with the Irish Institute of Taxation, which he completed in 2010.

He left AIB in the autumn of 2007, a year before the full scale of the financial crash became evident, not because he saw what was coming but because he had become uncomfortable with the structure of the advice he was being asked to give. Bonuses were tied to product sales. Advice that might have been perfectly good for the client was perfectly bad for his number, and vice versa. He wrote a short memo to his own files, in 2006, setting out what a private wealth firm could look like if commission were removed from the equation entirely. That memo, essentially unchanged, is now the firm's internal policy.

“I wanted to build a firm where a client who paid me could also trust me. It turns out that is a harder combination to get right than it should be, and the only reliable way to get it right is to be paid, in full and in the open, by the client — and by nobody else.” — Finn Kelleher, founding note, 2008

Kelleher Wealth was founded in 2008 on three explicit rules: fixed fees agreed in advance, no trail commission of any kind, and no in-house product. The firm has never deviated from those rules. Finn still writes the advice himself, signs it himself, and meets every client at least twice a year. The operations side of the firm is run by Aoife Nolan, who joined in 2014 from Grant Thornton; Finn is the only fee-earning advisor on the roster.

Outside the firm he is a member of the Financial Planning Standards Board Ireland, an occasional contributor to the Irish Independent's personal finance pages, and — for reasons his children find slightly baffling — the assistant coach of an under-14s hurling team in Ranelagh. He lives in Dublin 6 with his wife, Aisling, a consultant paediatrician, and their three children.

He continues to read portfolio theory papers with the same earnest patience he brought to them at twenty-three, and remains quietly of the view that most of what is written about investing in the weekend press is, at best, noise dressed as signal.

§ 06 — Introductions

Introductions

We do not advertise for new clients and we do not take cold enquiries for placement on a waiting list. Almost every new engagement begins with an introduction.

Most of our new clients come to us through introductions — from an existing client, from the family solicitor, or from a tax advisor or accountant we have worked alongside on another engagement. This is not snobbery; it is the way a small firm stays small. It is also the way we can be sure, from the very first meeting, that the person sitting across the table is somebody we can genuinely help.

If you have been referred to us, please mention your referrer's name in your first message. It lets us plan the first conversation properly and, where helpful, loop your existing advisor into the work from day one.

If you have not been formally referred but know of our work, you are still very welcome to write. We will reply within two working days. If, after an initial exchange, it is not clear that we are the right firm for your situation, we will say so plainly, and — wherever possible — suggest a firm that is.

The initial meeting is in person at our offices on Lower Leeson Street, or — where distance makes that impractical — by secure video. It is complimentary, and it is ours. No invoice is raised unless we both subsequently decide to work together.