For over thirty years, Sanford Schmidt has counseled wealthy families on how best to preserve, pass on, and impart their wealth through the generations. In his capacity as Founder and Chairman of Schmidt Financial Group in Northbrook, Illinois, Schmidt has earned a reputation as a thoughtful and client-centric adviser who brings a multi-dimensional approach that coordinates planning, insurance, and estate plans with an individual family’s stated goals and limitations.
Professional background and credentials
Sanford Schmidt, a graduate of the University of Illinois at Chicago with a Bachelor of Science in Accounting, holds the CFP®, ChFC, and CLU designations and FINRA Series 6, 63, 65, and 22 registrations. He is designated a lifetime member of the Million Dollar Round Table (Top of the Table), AALU, and Forum 400 as a recognition of long-term participation in higher-level integrated planning communities. The Schmidt Financial Group also considers itself a boutique planning practice, as it works with high-net-worth families, provides clients with integrated solutions, and maintains a constant focus on governance, compliance, and collaboration with outside counsel and accountants.
Founding perspective and firm values
The inception of Schmidt Financial Group is simple enough: produce strategic and client-focused solutions that allow wealthy families to protect, transfer, and grow their wealth. This is done without losing sight of their risk tolerance, liquidity concerns, and intergenerational objectives. Over the years, Sanford Schmidt has attributed the firm’s longevity to principled advice delivery, structured implementation, and a strong, open platform of accountability among the team, ultimately responsible for delivering on the promise to the clients. These principles inform the firm’s approach to the implementation of insurance structures, wealth transfer strategies, and planning considerations—short and longer term–related to portfolios for entrepreneurs and seniors.
A foundational practice is working with legal and accounting professionals as a matter of routine, especially when a case requires solutions such as trust architecture, entity restructuring, or insurance-funded arrangements. The constant focus is to contextualize technical recommendations to the client’s clearly articulated goals, while maintaining control where necessary and reducing friction in implementation when possible.
Communication and collaboration: how the work gets done
Founder & Chairman Sanford Schmidt leads the structure of the firm. In structured communications, different specialties are grouped separately. Wealth planning and insurance are purposely separated and have their own oversight and workflow. This separation ensures we will remain in compliance with the naming conventions of their discipline, and it creates clarity that domain experts will own decisions in their respective areas of responsibility. In practice, this means that the fact-finding, needs analysis, and strategy memos that focus on the wealth planning pieces of the client experience will track along their own path as those for insurance design and implementation. The separation itself inherently limits the amount of cross-talk between disciplines. It also clearly delineates areas of responsibility, and it supports audit readiness.
Collaboration across firms with estate attorneys and CPAs is structured but flexible. The firm does not expect to be provided a single, inflexible playbook for 100% of our clients. Instead, we calibrate the deliverables around the dynamics of the client’s unique “fact pattern” (the facts, goals, constraints, family dynamics, and entity map). We use a shared brief and subsequently a shared checklist to maintain clients and advisors aligned on definitions (e.g., the definition of “control” within the context of governance or how the buy-sell mechanics will trigger). We use secure portals and data rooms with strict version control, primarily when several firms are dealing with trusts, operating agreements, and a policy ownership structure that might provide language.
Family dynamics are equally as significant as cash flow and tax issues in multigenerational planning. The most likely situation for miscommunication is when intentions are assumed rather than expressed. To mitigate this risk, Schmidt Financial Group arranges appropriate family meetings, including adult children, so that they can listen directly to the parents’ long-term thinking. In Schmidt’s experience, these conversations reveal values and preferences that give parents clarity, while also allowing the next-gen heirs to express their own priorities and concerns. The primary goal is to memorialize intent and minimize ambiguity, rather than build consensus where it may not exist.
A recent engagement illustrates the approach. For a family reconsidering its estate plan, we brought in an outside attorney who first examined all existing documents and then provided an indicative reading on those documents. That third-party reading allowed the client to have a reliable reference to track and frame the decisions that lay ahead. The communication was effective because the roles were defined: the outside attorney assessed legal sufficiency and options, the accounting professional modeled tax effects, and Schmidt Financial Group interpreted this into a coordinating plan that met the family’s governance and liquidity objectives.
Tools, protocols, and decision criteria
Schmidt’s rule for technology is simple: use the tool that eliminates friction but doesn’t dilute judgment. Client portals compartmentalize documents; encrypted text provides timely clarifications that shouldn’t wait for quarterly reviews; and e-sign (with a clear audit trail) speeds execution. Visual balance-sheet dashboards help clients visualize how unrelated assets – operating companies, real estate, qualified plans, irrevocable trusts, and insurance relate to each other. When clients are transient or there are multiple decision-makers, these aspects provide shared visibility and lessen version-drifting risk.
Protocols for remote or hybrid collaboration use the same logic. Case rounds and documented reasons for advice maintain continuity between meetings and provide on-ramp facilitation for new team members with contextual continuity. Role clarification – who drafts, who reviews, who signs, and establishes a defensible process. Consistent ‘check-ups’ and post-engagement debriefs allow for project movement and refinement of lessons learned into new checklists or templates.
Feedback is unremarkable. When done internally, with external professionals, Schmidt Financial Group has established structured follow-up reviews to confirm what the team decided, what remains open, and why. That rigor has improved cycle-time on future cases and promoted a culture in which clarity is valued more than quantity.
Adapting the message to the audience
Communication is contingent on the individual in front of the group. Founders and CEOs facing time pressures frequently prefer briefings emphasizing decision points and trade-offs; the materials balance brevity with enough depth of support to be defensible when presented for a board or family office. Attorneys and CPAs, on the other hand, tend to prefer information in fuller documentation form, footnoted assumptions, and corresponding membership documents cross-referenced within the papers. With next-gen heirs, the team begins with context. What exists, why was it created, and what choices are left, then shifts into tactics.
Active listening is the basis of these differences. Decades of experience and training credentials matter, but Schmidt emphasizes the listening that brings to light unstated goals, such as education funding for future generations, philanthropic objectives, or governance preferences that consider values (e.g., stewardship, privacy) in addition to tax efficiency. The firm’s discovery process employs open-ended questions to help clients work through the general intent of what they want to do into specific constraints on what the plan can honor. Where appropriate, technical tools (e.g. ownership structures for policy, charitable vehicles) are introduced as a way to provoke thought and clarify intent, not as choices already made.
Technology, trends, and the next planning cycle
In recent discussions, Sanford Schmidt has focused on technology – data analytics, data-monitoring tools, and thoughtfully utilized AI -as an efficiency lever for planning and investment oversight. The throughline is not about newness for its own sake, but about faster iterations and closer alignment to the recommendations and documented objectives. For Schmidt Financial Group, the technology roadmap is about enhancing visibility, compression of cycle time, and the ability to keep a demonstrated record of advice and decisions as the operating environment evolves.
Governance, compliance, and client advocacy
Fiduciary position, suitability protocols, and involvement with independent legal and tax professionals are a repetitive theme on Sanford Schmidt’s public profiles. That posture shows up in the order of the firm’s work (discovery, modeling, legal review, implementation, and monitoring), and the way the firm documents the decisions made. The intention is to keep the client’s objectives well defined and then make sure the implementation steps are done in compliance with current rules of the road, carrier guidelines, and advisor limits.
Building trust and rapport
Trust isn’t branded. Trust is the outcome of a credible process and predictable follow-through. In initial meetings, Schmidt provides background and experience to establish context. For a practical perspective, he cites case references, described generally and confidentially, to give a sense of previous framing and processing around similar problems. He also cites memberships and credentials to signal his engagement with technical communities; documented workflows to communicate the vetting of recommendations and the accountable parties; and reporting on the roles that initiate each recommendation.
Clients develop rapport when they feel understood and protected. The firm’s focus on communicating, in a routine and structured way, is condensed into one-page summaries of plans when appropriate, comparing meeting cadence to the complexity of the engagement, and compliance sign-offs, where each relates to role responsibilities. The firm aims to achieve a positive outcome without the pomp and circumstance.
Mentorship, education, and community
As we step out of the client room, Sanford Schmidt calls out mentorship and financial literacy as a way to fortify not only families but the larger community as well. The firm has written and promoted stories that are centered around practical literacy, helping people take their goals and translate them into plans, and then their plans into sustainable behavior. This perspective reflects consideration of time: wealth planning is not simply a series of transactions, but a governance discussion that unfolds over time and across generations.
A steady approach for complex decisions
A consistent portrait of Sanford Schmidt and Schmidt Financial Group depicts purposeful, systematized performance. The firm distinguishes specializations to adhere to compliance restraints, engages advisors through written briefs, and engages families through facilitated discussions that express intent before striving for tax or liquidity optimization. Technology provides clarity and speed, but is not a substitute for judgment. Success is simple: strategies that can be understood, explained, and executed, now and across the next generation.
In a space without much simplicity, that combination of clarity, collaboration, and consistency is the point. It allows Schmidt Financial Group to turn technical options into usable plans, and it will enable families to protect their assets and their intent.