Blackshire Wealth Management is a fee-only, fiduciary firm at 1065 Andrew Drive in West Chester. We build one coordinated plan for Chester County families: investments, taxes, retirement income, estate, and equity compensation.
Plenty of firms say wealth management when they mean investment management. They build you a portfolio, send you a quarterly statement, and call it a day. That is one piece of the job. It is not the job.
Real wealth management 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 is made by a different person, or by no one, the pieces fight each other. We wrote about what happens when advice goes uncoordinated, because we see the damage in nearly every new client relationship.
So when we say wealth management, 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.
Chester County has quietly become one of the wealthiest counties in Pennsylvania. West Chester, Malvern, Downingtown, and Exton anchor the center. Kennett Square and Chadds Ford anchor the south. Each town has its own version of the same story: families who built real wealth through long careers, businesses, and decades of disciplined saving, and who now need that wealth to do something more complicated than grow.
The employer base drives the complexity. Vanguard in Malvern. SAP in Newtown Square. QVC in West Chester. The pharmaceutical corridor that runs from the county line down into Delaware. These employers pay well and pay in complicated ways: restricted stock, employee stock purchase plans, deferred compensation, and retirement plans with real fine print. We built dedicated planning pages for Vanguard employees, SAP employees, and QVC employees because we work through those exact situations every week.
We also serve each corner of the county in person. See our pages for West Chester, Kennett Square, Malvern, and Chadds Ford. The office is at 1065 Andrew Drive in West Chester, and video works fine when it snows.
Most wealth management in this county is sold, not advised. Advisors at wirehouses and insurance-affiliated firms can be paid commissions when you buy certain products. That does not make them bad people. It does mean their recommendations carry a conflict you cannot see 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. 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.
On a few million dollars passing to your children, 4.5 percent is real money. Planning can soften it. How assets are titled matters. Beneficiary designations matter. Lifetime gifting matters. Life insurance proceeds paid to a named beneficiary are exempt. And because Delaware has no inheritance tax at all, the border question comes up constantly in the southern half of the county. We wrote a full comparison of Pennsylvania and Delaware death taxes, and 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 our retirement planning in West Chester page and 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, 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 in Kennett Square with my family. Chester County is not a territory on a map for me. It is home. 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.
The titles are not regulated, so the labels mean little on their own. In practice, wealth management usually describes a broader engagement: investment management plus tax planning, retirement income design, estate coordination, and equity compensation strategy, handled as one coordinated plan. That is the work Blackshire does. Ask any firm exactly which of those areas they cover and who is accountable for coordinating them.
Most of our clients are in the $500K to $5M+ investable asset range, but we focus on complexity and fit over a hard minimum. If your situation involves equity compensation, a business, or a retirement date on the calendar, it is worth a conversation.
Our office is at 1065 Andrew Drive, Suite 2b in West Chester, central to most of the county. We meet in person there, over video, or a mix of both. Plenty of clients start remote and switch to in person once the plan gets going.
Your first call is 30 minutes. No obligation, no sales pitch. Just an honest conversation about where you are and where you want to be.
Schedule a Free Intro CallOr call us at (302) 203-9634 · info@blackshirewealth.com · Send a message