Wealth Uncensored

If you and your partner have built a life together without getting married, your estate planning is more complicated than a married couple's, and most of the default protections married people take for granted do not apply to you.

This episode is the full picture. I start with the basics people skip: documenting who contributed what to jointly-acquired assets, and understanding how common-law marriage and cohabitation laws work in your jurisdiction, because in some places they create obligations you never agreed to, and in others they give you no rights at all. I cover cohabitation agreements, the question of how to provide for a partner who left the workforce, and the healthcare and incapacity directives that matter even more when you are not married, since you have no automatic say in a medical crisis.

Then I get into structure. There are three ways to architect this. Siloed sub-funds, where each partner controls their own portion and appoints their own council member, trustee, or protector for it. Exit mechanisms written in advance so a split does not turn into a war. And parallel mirrored structures. I also cover the commingled appreciation problem, which is where a lot of these arrangements quietly go wrong.

In this episode:

If you are building wealth with a partner and you are not married, the law is not going to fill in the gaps for you. This episode is how you fill them in yourself.

For GCC families thinking about how to pass wealth to the next generation, the question often comes down to waqf or foundation. Let me be clear up front: waqf is a real institution with centuries of history and deep religious and cultural meaning. It does a specific job, and it does it well.

A foundation does a different job. It is a flexible, modern structure for governing family wealth, managing multiple branches of a family, and setting clear rules for succession. For a lot of the families I work with, especially larger families with multiple wives and multiple branches, the answer is both: waqf for the charitable and religious legacy, a foundation for the family wealth and its governance.

In this episode I walk through what each one does, where they overlap, where they do not, and how a family can use both without the two working against each other.

In this episode:

If your family is weighing how to structure its legacy, this is a careful look at two tools that are often treated as competitors.

Wealth Uncensored is hosted by Jimmy Sexton, LL.M., Founder and CEO of Esquire Group. For more, visit esquiregroup.com.

A flee clause is supposed to be your escape hatch. If your trust's jurisdiction turns hostile, the trust packs up and moves somewhere safer, automatically. It is one of the most common things people ask me to put in a structure. In most cases today, it does not work.

Flee clauses worked fine before KYC and AML rules took over. A trustee in a new jurisdiction could step in quickly. That world is gone. Onboarding a new trustee now means months of due diligence, source-of-funds review, and compliance checks. By the time the new trustee can actually act, the threat you were fleeing has already arrived, and the clause sits in the document doing nothing.

In this episode I explain why flee clauses give people a false sense of security, and what works instead: backup trustees who are already onboarded and ready, co-trustees already sitting in a second jurisdiction, and multinational trust companies that can move the trust internally without starting over. I also cover why foundation redomiciliation runs into the same wall.

In this episode:

If you have a flee clause in your structure and you think you are covered, this episode is worth fifteen minutes.

Wealth Uncensored is hosted by Jimmy Sexton, LL.M., Founder and CEO of Esquire Group. For more, visit esquiregroup.com.

When a region is in the headlines, you would expect wealthy families to freeze. Defer the foundation. Put the move on hold. Wait and see.

That is not what I saw on the ground.

Over the past six months, not one of my clients considered leaving Dubai. In-process projects kept moving. One client who was mid-setup paused, then continued during the crisis once I walked them through how to actually evaluate the risk, the same reasoning I lay out in this episode. One prospective client paused and has since restarted. And I was engaged for new setups while all of it was going on.

The situation is still unfolding. But the gap between what the headlines implied and what actually happened is the whole point. This episode is about why the people who understand jurisdictional risk did not flinch, what Dubai's infrastructure actually proved, and how to evaluate a jurisdiction in a way that holds up no matter what the next headline says.

In this episode:

If you paused a foundation, a structure, or a move over the past six months, this is the framework for deciding what to do next.

AI has changed how lawyers, accountants, and advisors work. It has also changed how clients show up to meetings — often with a printout from ChatGPT and questions about why the advice you just gave them doesn’t match what the chatbot said.

In this episode I sit back down with James G. Burns, Esq. — California estate planning and asset protection attorney with over 25 years of experience — to talk honestly about what AI is doing to our profession. Not the marketing version. The real version.

We get into the professionals over-relying on AI without the expertise to verify its output. The ones who do have the expertise but skip verification anyway because the answer looked clean. The advisors using AI confidence to wander into practice areas they have no business being in. The attorney-client privilege questions nobody wants to think about. And the new client dynamic where every engagement now includes 30 minutes of unwinding whatever the client’s AI told them last night.

If you advise wealthy clients, or you are one trying to figure out where AI fits and where it doesn’t, this conversation is for you.

Topics covered:

Guest: James G. Burns, Esq. — Law Office of James Burns, Aliso Viejo, CA. Estate planning, asset protection, tax, and business law.

Most people hear “life insurance” and think death benefit. For ultra-high-net-worth and international families, Private Placement Life Insurance is something very different: a legal, tax, insurance, and succession-planning chassis that can change how a family’s capital is owned, compounded, protected, and transferred across generations.

In this episode, I sit down with James G. Burns — estate planning and international wealth structuring attorney at the Law Office of James Burns — to unpack PPLI as architecture, not a product. We cover why after-tax compounding matters more than gross return at the UHNW level, how PPLI may improve the U.S. dividend withholding profile for foreign investors, and where it fits inside forced-heirship and Sharia-sensitive succession planning.

We also get into pre-immigration planning — why timing before U.S. tax residency is everything — and the advanced terrain of in-kind funding and asset protection design.

This is an honest conversation about what PPLI can and cannot do. No magic, no loopholes. Just the architecture.

Topics covered:

Guest: James G. Burns, Esq. — Law Office of James Burns

Most professionals think networking is about making a sale. That mindset is exactly why it fails.

In this episode of Wealth Uncensored, Jimmy Sexton, LL.M. sits down with Dorie Clark, one of the world’s leading voices on professional relationships, to break down why traditional networking advice leads people astray.

They discuss why conferences often encourage the worst possible behavior, how aggressive selling repels high-quality relationships, and why the most successful people in business focus on curiosity, shared interests, and long-term connection instead of immediate ROI.

Jimmy and Dorie explore the difference between transactional networking and relationship-building, why elite circles operate on trust rather than pitch decks, and how being genuinely interesting beats being relentlessly persistent. From VIP environments to organic friendships that turn into clients, referral sources, or lifelong connections, this conversation reframes what networking should actually look like for serious professionals.

If you work with or around high-net-worth individuals and want to build relationships that compound over decades, this episode will change how you think about networking.

On this episode of Wealth Uncensored, Jimmy Sexton, LL.M. sits down with Dorie Clark to explore an overlooked but critical flaw in estate and incapacity planning.

Dorie shares a personal story about being called to make urgent medical decisions for her mother while traveling. Although the legal documents existed, she did not have immediate access to them when it mattered most. The experience revealed a hard truth that many families learn the painful way. Planning alone is not enough. Access, communication, and clarity are what determine whether a plan actually works in a crisis.

Together, Jimmy and Dorie unpack why families must go beyond drafting documents and focus on where documents live, who can access them, and how responsibilities are communicated across generations. This conversation is essential listening for anyone who believes estate planning is complete once the paperwork is signed.

In this episode of Wealth Uncensored, I sit down with my brother, Erik Sexton, SIOR, a trusted advisor to high net worth individuals and family offices on U.S. commercial real estate, to dissect the complexities of investing in property across jurisdictions.

We start by unpacking U.S. tax considerations for foreign investors, including entity selection, FIRPTA exposure, and strategies to improve after‑tax returns. We then transition to estate planning and asset protection for U.S. real estate holdings, focusing on structures that shield wealth and facilitate legacy transfer.

Next, Erik and I explore the UAE real estate landscape, taxation, ownership vehicles, and planning tools for investors. We highlight actionable structures that align tax efficiency with robust protection and discuss common pitfalls for foreign buyers in both markets.

Whether you’re a family office allocating global real estate capital, or an individual investor seeking cross‑border clarity, this episode delivers tactical insights you can apply now.

In this episode of Wealth Uncensored, Jimmy Sexton sits down with his brother, Erik Sexton, SIOR, a top industrial and commercial real estate broker based in Las Vegas with two decades of experience advising family offices, institutional players, and private investors. Erik brings elite credentials from the Society of Industrial and Office Realtors (SIOR) and deep transactional insight into what’s happening in industrial, office, and logistics property markets. 

You’ve seen the headlines: “Foreign investment in U.S. real estate is rising.” But on the ground, Jimmy sees something different. Erik shares what he’s seeing from his work with international capital, what’s driving selective selling, why some foreign holders are reallocating, and where real opportunity still exists for savvy capital. If you invest globally or advise UHNW families, this episode cuts through confusion with real data points and boots‑on‑the‑ground perspective.

This episode delivers clarity on the disconnect between the headlines and real investor behavior.