Blackshire Wealth Management is a fee-only, fiduciary firm just over the county line in West Chester. We build one coordinated plan for Delaware County families: investments, taxes, retirement income, estate, and equity compensation.
A lot of firms call themselves financial advisors and mean something much narrower: they manage a portfolio, send a quarterly statement, and leave the rest to you. That is one piece of the job. It is not the whole job.
Real financial planning is coordination. Your investments, your tax return, your retirement income plan, your estate documents, and your equity compensation all pull on the same rope. A Roth conversion changes your Medicare premiums. A stock sale changes your tax bracket. A beneficiary form overrides your will. When each of those decisions gets made by a different person, or by no one, the pieces work against each other instead of together. We wrote about what happens when advice goes uncoordinated, because it is the damage we see in nearly every new client relationship.
So when we say financial advisor, we mean one plan that covers investment management, tax planning, retirement income design, estate coordination, insurance review, and equity compensation strategy. One firm accountable for the whole picture, not just the account balance.
Our office sits in West Chester, a few minutes from the Delaware County line, and a large share of our client base comes from the townships and boroughs on the other side of it: Media, Swarthmore, Wallingford, Springfield, Broomall, Havertown, Radnor, and Newtown Square. It is old money and new money side by side, generations-deep Main Line families next to households two or three years out from an equity grant that changed everything.
The employer base adds real complexity. SAP's North American campus sits in Newtown Square. Villanova University anchors Radnor. Vanguard's headquarters in Malvern and Comcast in Philadelphia both draw heavily from Delaware County towns for their workforce. These employers pay well and pay in complicated ways: restricted stock, employee stock purchase plans, deferred compensation, and retirement plans with fine print most people never read closely. We built dedicated planning pages for SAP employees, Vanguard employees, and Comcast employees because we work through those exact situations regularly.
We also have a dedicated page for Newtown Square specifically, and for the neighboring counties: Chester County to the west and Wilmington, DE to the south. Most meetings happen over video regardless of which side of the county line a client lives on.
A lot of financial advice comes with product commissions built into it. Advisors at wirehouses and insurance-affiliated firms are often paid when you buy certain products, which is a conflict that does not show up on the invoice.
Blackshire is fee-only. We are paid only by our clients. No commissions, no revenue sharing, no product quotas. We are also a fiduciary, which means we are required to act in your interest at all times. If an annuity or an insurance policy is genuinely right for you, we will say so, and we will earn nothing when you buy it. If the distinction between fee-only and fee-based is fuzzy, our article on what fee-only fiduciary actually means spells it out.
Pennsylvania has no estate tax, but it does have an inheritance tax, and it applies at nearly every level of wealth, in Delaware County the same as anywhere else in the state. Transfers to a surviving spouse are taxed at zero percent. Transfers to children and grandchildren are taxed at 4.5 percent. Transfers to siblings are taxed at 12 percent, and transfers to most other heirs at 15 percent. Those rates come from the Pennsylvania Department of Revenue, and unlike the federal estate tax, there is no multimillion dollar exemption standing in front of them. Estimate your family's exposure with our free inheritance tax calculator →
On a few million dollars passing to your children, 4.5 percent is real money, and it shows up more often here than people expect given how much Delaware County wealth sits in real estate and long-held brokerage accounts. Planning can soften it: how assets are titled, who is named as beneficiary, whether lifetime gifting makes sense. Life insurance proceeds paid to a named beneficiary are exempt entirely. Estate coordination, including family continuity planning, is a standing part of every plan we build.
Every engagement follows the same four step process. Understand: we start with your full picture, meaning accounts, tax returns, estate documents, equity grants, and what you actually want the money to do. Design: we build the plan, modeling retirement income, tax strategy, and investment allocation as one system. Execute: we implement it, handle the paperwork, and coordinate with your CPA and estate attorney. Refine: we meet through the year and adjust as tax law, markets, and your life change. The full scope of what that covers is on our services page.
If retirement income is your front burner issue, start with the free calculators in our Retirement Hub.
We deliberately limit how many families we take on. Coordination is the whole point, and coordination does not survive an advisor with four hundred households.
I founded Blackshire after a decade in tech, including six years at SAP, headquartered right in Newtown Square, where I was a vice president and managed my own equity compensation, deferred income, and the annual tax puzzle that came with it. Before tech I started my career in wealth management at Wilmington Trust and the Private Bank at J.P. Morgan. I hold an MBA and the ChFC designation, and I live just over the county line in Kennett Square. Delaware County is not a territory on a map for me, it is where I built my career. You can read the longer version on our story page or meet the team.
It depends on the fee model. Advisors in this area charge in several ways: a percentage of assets under management, a flat annual fee, or hourly project fees. The more important question is how the advisor is paid. Fee-only firms like Blackshire are paid only by their clients, never by commissions on products, so the fee you see is the whole cost. Before any engagement begins, we put your exact fee in writing so you can compare it against anyone else you are talking to.
Our office is at 1065 Andrew Drive, Suite 2b in West Chester, a short drive from Media, Newtown Square, and most of central Delaware County. We meet in person there, over video, or a mix of both, and plenty of clients start remote and switch to in person once the plan gets going.
The relationship minimum is $500,000 in assets under management, with household and related entity accounts counted together where permitted. We can reduce or waive it at our discretion, usually where the situation is complex or the assets are close. If your situation involves equity compensation, a business, or a retirement date on the calendar, it is worth a conversation.
Regularly. Our founder spent six years at SAP, whose North American campus is in Newtown Square, and we have dedicated planning pages for both SAP and Vanguard employees covering equity compensation, deferred comp, and retirement timing specific to each plan.
Your first call is 30 minutes. An honest conversation about where you are and where you want to be.
Schedule an Introductory ConversationOr call us at (302) 203-9634 · info@blackshirewealth.com · Send a message
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