01, Knoxville, Tennessee
Wealth, managed the way it was meant to be, personally.
An independent fiduciary practice in Knoxville, TN. Serving East Tennessee families since 2015.
02, Approach
Three commitments the practice is built on.
02.1
Your wealth is more than a portfolio. Your plan should be too.
A retirement portfolio carries real tax consequences. A business sale is also an estate event. Healthcare costs in your seventies reshape your income picture. Most firms manage one slice of all that and refer the rest out, leaving you to coordinate professionals who never speak to each other. We write one plan that holds the pieces together: risk, tax strategy, business transition, the next generation, because the parts only work when they are built to work as one.
02.2
Real estate is worth considering. Many portfolios leave it out.
Most portfolios are built from stocks, bonds, and mutual funds. Useful instruments, but they trade on the same exchanges, track the same indices, and often move in the same direction when markets turn. Where it suits the plan and the household can carry the risk, we look at real estate held outside the public markets as a way to broaden what a portfolio is exposed to.
These investments carry material risks, including illiquidity. Read the full risk disclosure →
02.3
The plan is the point. The portfolio serves the plan.
Markets will do what markets do. What matters is whether your tax strategy survives the next administration, whether your daughter knows what to do if you cannot, whether the cabin gets passed down without a family argument. The plan answers those questions. The portfolio is one of its tools.
03, What we do
Four disciplines, woven into a single plan.
At Amrein Wealth Strategists we believe that investing is not only about how much money you make. It is about how much of it you keep.
Most clients arrive with a portfolio that has been optimized for return and never tested for what could break it. We look at sequence-of-returns risk, longevity, healthcare events, liability exposure, and concentration in a single asset, often a business or a longtime employer’s stock. The goal is not to avoid risk. It is to know exactly which risks you are taking, why, and what each one would cost if it came due.
Every portfolio has an asset allocation. Where the money sits can matter as much as how it is invested.
The same dollar earns a different after-tax return depending on which account it sits in. Bonds, with their ordinary income, generally belong in tax-deferred accounts. Tax-efficient equity funds generally belong in taxable accounts where capital gains can be controlled. High-growth assets generally belong in Roth accounts where compounding is untaxed. Many portfolios are built without accounting for any of this.
Asset location does not guarantee a better result. Whether it helps, and by how much, depends on your own tax situation, your account mix, and tax law, all of which change.
Most owners spend years building a business and weeks planning how to sell it. We start the exit conversation long before it feels urgent.
For many of our clients, the most valuable thing they own is a business. The years between deciding to sell and signing the closing documents are where a great deal of value is made or lost, through pre-sale tax planning, entity restructuring, key-employee retention, and the timing of the sale itself. After the sale, the question becomes how to deploy the proceeds without paying tax twice or losing the character of what was built.
Wealth that survives one generation. And the one after that.
Families often lose track of what was built by the time it reaches the grandchildren, and the usual reason is silence. Nobody was told what was built, why, or how to steward it. We facilitate the conversations most families never have: structured gifting, irrevocable trusts where they make sense, beneficiary education, and family meetings built around a shared vocabulary.
04, The planning gap
These are the gaps we look for first.
16%
of households with over $25 million in net worth have no estate plan, will, or trust
42%
of U.S. adults say they need more life insurance than they have, about 102 million people
49%
of millionaires say their financial planning needs improvement
These are published findings about U.S. households in general. They are not statements about this practice, its clients, or any result you should expect. Sources: Vanilla, 2023 State of Estate Planning Report (1,049 U.S. consumers surveyed June 2023). LIMRA, 2024 Insurance Barometer Study. Northwestern Mutual, 2025 Planning & Progress Study, conducted by The Harris Poll among 4,626 U.S. adults, January 2025.
Downtown Knoxville, from the Tennessee River
East Tennessee, the country we work in
05, The principal
I am the son of educators. They taught me that anything worth knowing can be said in plain English. It has been the rule of this practice ever since.Pete Amrein, Founder
Pete Amrein · Knoxville
01, Founder & Principal
Pete Amrein
Financial Advisor
Pete has worked in financial services since 2015, including years with two of the country’s largest firms, before founding Amrein Wealth Strategists in January 2024. Long enough to learn how the big shops operate, and to understand what becomes possible when an advisor keeps a small, deliberate client list with the time to build a real plan for each family in it. He answers his own phone, opens his own mail, and meets with every household at least twice a year. He believes most financial mistakes are made on Tuesday mornings, in a hurry, with the wrong information, and that the job of an advisor is mostly to be available before the hurry begins.
02, Away from the desk
Pete lives in Knoxville with his wife Maggie, a registered nurse, and their son and daughter, both learning to golf, with mixed enthusiasm. Saturdays in the fall belong to the Tennessee Vols; summer evenings, to whatever baseball game is on. The rest of his free time he spends in the yard with the kids, on a fairway with friends, or tending a fire on the back patio with neighbors.
06, Contact
Let’s have a conversation.
We take on a small number of new families each year. The first conversation is unhurried, costs nothing, and tells us both whether we are the right fit. Reach out by phone, or pick a time on Pete’s calendar.
Where we are
Knoxville, TennesseeServing families across East Tennessee