Dear Clients and Friends,
As I reflect on the past year, I’m reminded that your experience as a client isn’t shaped by headlines or market noise; it’s shaped by the quality of advice you receive, the responsiveness of your team, and the confidence you feel in the decisions you’re making.
Everything we’ve done over the past year has been with that in mind, strengthening our ability to serve you with greater depth, attention to detail, and consistency across every interaction.
In 2025, several important developments positioned us to deliver an even higher level of service and expertise to you and those important to you:
- Through our merger with Wealthstream Advisors, you now have access to a broader team with expanded capabilities and a presence in New York City, allowing us to bring more specialized insight and resources to your planning.
- As we surpassed $10 billion in assets managed[1] for clients, we’ve been able to continue investing in our infrastructure, technology, and talent, enhancing the experience, reporting, and proactive planning you receive.
- We’ve intentionally grown and deepened our team so that you benefit from a more specialized and collaborative approach. Today, our team includes 68 professionals (including 23 partners), 32 CERTIFIED FINANCIAL PLANNER® professionals[2], 3 CPAs, 3 CFAs, and additional specialists across estate planning, equity compensation, tax strategy, retirement plans, and more.
What matters most, however, is how this translates into your life.
Over the past year, we’ve had the privilege of helping clients navigate some of their most important moments, whether that meant evaluating the sale of a business, preparing for retirement, structuring meaningful charitable giving, making significant real estate decisions, funding education for the next generation, or guiding families through the loss of a loved one.
These are deeply personal decisions, and they deserve thoughtful, coordinated advice. Our responsibility and commitment are to bring clarity, care, and precision to each of them.
We recognize the trust you place in us. Few professions sit at the intersection of so many important aspects of life—family, career, health, and long-term aspirations—and we approach this responsibility with humility and focus every day.
Built to Serve the Long Term
Why 100% Employee Ownership Matters
This year marked an important chapter in Greenspring’s story with the all-stock merger of Greenspring Advisors and Wealthstream Advisors.
From the outside, mergers often raise questions. Internally, we focused on one thing above all else: protecting what makes this firm special.
Greenspring remains 100% employee owned. At the end of 2025, over 60% of our team members were participating in some component of equity in the firm. In an industry where Private Equity has become a dominant force, we have a strong belief that an employee partnership model creates the best outcomes for our clients. Incentives matter, and when Private Equity is the majority owner of a business, the primary incentive is profit. When the owners are the same people who are managing the clients and running the firm, the client’s viewpoint and experience are going to factor heavily into every decision that is made.
In addition, we believe this structure allows us to:
- Make decisions with a long time horizon
- Reinvest in our people, systems, and services
- Remain independent and free from outside pressures
- Align our success directly with our clients’ success
The combination with Wealthstream brought scale, talent, and new capabilities, but just as importantly, it brought shared values. The result is a stronger firm, better equipped to serve clients for decades to come. If you want to learn more about the merger, please click here to watch this interview.
Investing Through a Real-World Stress Test
Markets in 2025 reminded us, again, that uncertainty is not an exception; it’s the norm.
From renewed tariff discussions to shifting economic expectations, investors were challenged to separate signal from noise. Periods like these don’t reward prediction. They reward preparation, discipline, and communication.
Behind the scenes, our investment and advisory teams were active:
- Rebalancing portfolios – Throughout 2025, our team placed over 70,000 trades to rebalance portfolios.
- Executing tax-loss harvesting where appropriate – It was not surprising that one of the highest months of trading activity was in April, when markets were at their low. These trades were often made to maximize after-tax returns for our clients.
- Stress testing allocations – We held hundreds of meetings with clients to discuss their financial plans and how they would hold up during market dislocations, as we saw in the first quarter of the year.
Recent returns may look different from historical averages, but history continues to reinforce a timeless lesson: Successful investing is less about reacting and more about staying aligned with a thoughtful plan.
We explored these themes more deeply in our recent webinar and podcast, which many of you joined or listened to. Click here to watch more.
As I write this letter in early 2026, the lessons we learned from 2025 are helping to prepare our clients for the current volatility. While history doesn’t always repeat, it often rhymes.
Planning That Extends Beyond Portfolios
Across our private client practice, 2025 was a year of expansion. Expansion of team members and expansion of capabilities. As of 12/31/2025, our private client team managed over $4 billion of client assets, helping over 1,800 families live their ideal life.
This year, our teams completed:
- Hundreds of proactive tax projections
- Roth conversion analyses tailored to individual situations
- Ongoing planning around evolving legislation, including the new tax bill known as OBBBA
Much of this work happens quietly, well before year-end, but its impact is lasting.
We also continue to expand the ways we support clients beyond traditional investing, including:
- Cash management solutions to increase after-tax returns on cash
- Direct indexing to generate tax alpha within our clients’ stock and bond portfolios
- Securities lending to access alternative financing at negotiated rates
- Cross-border planning to make the aspiration of living abroad a reality
- Healthcare coverage consulting to manage the complexity of one of the largest costs in retirement
- Access to insights from our institutional retirement practice to bring large company experience to everyday business owners
If you’re not using these services today, it doesn’t mean they weren’t built for you; it may simply mean the right moment hasn’t arrived yet.
Serving Organizations and the People Behind Them
Our institutional practice continues to grow, but what matters most to us isn’t just scale—it’s impact. Our mission remains simple: to allow every worker to retire with dignity.
Today, we support over $6 billion for foundations, endowments, and retirement assets across 170+ employer plans, serving more than 52,000 participants. That’s 52,000 individuals making real financial decisions about their futures.
The continued growth of our Pooled Employer Plan (PEP) has been especially meaningful. A PEP is a retirement plan structure that allows multiple unrelated employers to participate in a single, professionally managed 401(k) plan, simplifying administration and oversight. At the end of 2025, Greenspring’s PEP held more than $400 million of assets for 14 employers. We expect this to grow to over $800 million by the end of 2026. Employers are drawn to the PEP for its ability to reduce administrative complexity, transfer fiduciary exposure, and create cost efficiencies through scale. For over 3,000 employees, it expands access to objective fiduciary guidance and advice built around people, not products.
In 2026, we’re excited to introduce new participant services, including budgeting software and health insurance consulting, designed to support employees during key life and career transitions, from their first day on the job, through retirement.
Live Your Ideal Life
Greenspring’s Core Purpose, to help every person live their ideal life, has been our North Star. When we make important decisions, we always consider this goal. Here are some examples I’ve seen it show up in the last year:
- When working with clients, I have observed our advisors encouraging our clients to spend MORE money—buy that second home, take their family on a vacation. It may seem counterintuitive to what we do, but our advisors know that an ideal life means balancing wealth with enjoying life.
- Our firm has now given over $2 million to charity. While this may not generate the highest profits for our partners, it is directly aligned with our Core Purpose. We have been richly blessed and believe helping those less fortunate in our local communities is another way to help others live their ideal life.
- We are now in the third year of our GREEN Unit program. This program awards non-partner employees with two years of tenure equity-like grants so those team members can participate when Greenspring does well. We believe this program, along with other benefits, creates an environment where those we work with every day can live their ideal life.
- At the end of the year, I noticed a basket at our front desk filled with $5 Starbucks gift cards and a sign encouraging those dropping off packages or refilling our office supplies to take one and enjoy a beverage on us. While very small, it was such a great example of our team’s effort to make every person’s life we encounter a little better.
Thank You
Thank you for trusting us with your financial lives. That trust is earned one conversation, one decision, and one year at a time, and we never take it for granted.
In 2026, our commitment remains unchanged: to help every person live their ideal life, while living our Core Values every day: Love Your Neighbor, Own Your Stuff, Have a Bias Towards Action, Master Your Craft, and Trust the Evidence.
Wishing you and your family a healthy, peaceful, and fulfilling year.
