Game Changer Tax & Estate Planning · Baton Rouge, Louisiana
For most families, estate planning, tax planning, and financial planning happen in three different offices, with three different professionals, who never see each other's work. The attorney drafts from what the client remembers to bring. The tax preparer files what happened last year. The financial advisor manages what the client owns. Each does good work. None of them sees the whole picture.
Over at Game Changer Wealth, the separate investment advisory firm where I still practice, I sat on the financial side of that arrangement for years. I could see the accounts, the titles, the beneficiary forms, and the tax picture all at once, and I could see how much of it never made it into the room where the documents were drafted. Not because anyone did anything wrong. Because nobody was ever asked to look at all of it together.
As I often do, I was at a conference to earn continuing education credits and to look for what was new. This one was the LSU Law Center's annual Estate Planning Conference, where Louisiana's estate planning attorneys gather every fall. Eric Kallio, a tax attorney as well as an estate planning attorney, was sitting in the row in front of me. We got to talking, and he had been seeing the same thing from his side of the desk: opportunities missed, things that could have been done differently if the documents had been written with the whole picture in mind from the start. I said, “Eric, could we invent a different way to approach estate planning, where all of these disciplines come to the same virtual table to create better outcomes, the way a tumor board does in oncology?” And here we are today.
That is the whole idea. We look at all of it together, the accounts, the titles, the beneficiary forms, the tax picture, before a single document is generated, to find the opportunities, and we put them in writing for you as an Outcome Summary™ in plain English. Then the documents are written with those opportunities in mind. The planning team does the discovery and, after signing, the follow-through: titling, beneficiary forms, funding, and the check-ins that keep a plan working as life changes. An independent Louisiana attorney (Eric Kallio, Kallio Law Firm LLC) drafts with the whole picture already on the table.
We ran it that way inside Game Changer Wealth for several years, as a division serving that firm's clients. It worked, and word got around. Families who had never been anyone's wealth management client started asking for it, and it became clear the process had outgrown the division it started in. In 2024 Game Changer Tax & Estate Planning broke away to become its own company, with its own name and its own door, free of the account minimums normally required to work with Game Changer Wealth, so that every family in Louisiana could plan this way.
Jerry Linebaugh
Founder and Planning Advisor, Game Changer Tax & Estate Planning
