Scott H. Melbrod is the founder and CEO of Taxable Wealth, a tax and fee-focused wealth management firm based in San Diego, California. Taxable Wealth provides real estate investors and business owners financial advice specifically tailored to their respective needs—all for a flat, transparent fee.

Founded in 2019 and spun out of his family’s wealth management firm (Melbrod Wealth Management), Scott realized that most of the advice he was providing to his high-net-worth clients focused around lowering both their taxes and their fees. He traced the root cause of this to clients often coming to him after they had been sold unnecessary, high-cost products from traditional financial advisory firms. These firms couldn’t care less about taxes (sometimes they are restricted from talking about taxes) and are profitably oblivious when it comes to the fees because they are the recipients.

Often these clients were either real estate investors or owners of a small to mid-sized business, typically with a large percentage of their net worth tied up in their business or in real estate. Finding their next real estate deal or running the day-to-day operations of their business took up most of their attention, and they didn’t want to deal with any outside financial matters themselves. The easy thing was to outsource all of this to a friend or a local financial advisor without any vetting process with regards to whether that “advisor” was suited to handle their unique and complex needs. In fact, they needed more than the usual investment-focused services most firms offered. Having added value for more than a few of these clients with similar service needs, Scott saw this as an opportunity to build a service specifically for both real estate investors and business owners; and thus, Taxable Wealth was born.