Our Team
Charles Trakas
Founder/Managing Partner
Charles Trakas, President of Trakas Financial, LLC, a company providing Estate and Retirement Income Planning, is a Senior Wealth Advisor with Redwood Private Wealth, RIA, and Founder of Proactive Tax Reductions, a team of advanced tax specialists dedicated to delivering holistic tax reduction planning strategies, for high-net-worth individuals and business owners. Charles and his experienced team at Redwood Private Wealth help clients find and implement strategies to maximize income, minimize taxes, prepare for rising healthcare costs, and maximize Social Security benefits. We provide our clients with a Retirement Roadmap that gives you the best probability of achieving your long-term financial goals.
Over the last 26 years, Charles has successfully helped his clients navigate their goals by accumulating, protecting, and transferring their wealth with tax efficient solutions. A lifelong entrepreneur & financial coach, Charles is passionate about building strategic partnerships with CPAs, law firms, and insurance agencies that work with affluent and ultra-affluent individuals and families. Through those partnerships, we serve as your expert planning team, working collaboratively and focusing specifically on helping clients eliminate unnecessary taxes while protecting, preserving, and enhancing their wealth.
Paul "Tripp" LeFevre
CIO/Managing Partner
Tripp is a 25-year veteran of the industry and a Senior Wealth Advisor with Redwood Private Wealth. Tripp has appeared on Fox, New England Cable News, and other national media outlets.
After graduating from Boston University in 1989, Tripp began his career in the financial services industry. He owned and operated an institutional trading company on the floor of the Boston Stock Exchange, served as a Research Specialist helping hedge funds with investment and trading strategies, and was Head Trader at a large successful Hedge Fund. Having worked with some of the most successful investors in the world, Tripp learned that they were less concerned with how much money they could make and more concerned with how much they could lose. He helped implement complex risk management plans so that, when markets didn’t behave as anticipated, they could “live to fight another day”. Through his experience, he has also developed a perspective on risk and opportunity and an approach to improving risk-adjusted returns that is unique to most advisors that service individual investors.
Since transitioning away from the institutional trading world, Tripp has leveraged his experience and team of Tax Reduction Experts to help business owners and high-net-worth individuals implement tax reduction and financial risk management strategies to grow and protect their wealth. Tripp also uses many of these very same strategies to help those approaching, or already in, retirement understand their individual risks and implement plans that vastly improve their overall probability of meeting their retirement goals.
Independent Tax Consultants
Thomas Barber
Advanced Tax Consultant
Jason H. Kurchner CFP
FOUNDER & CEO, Sage Consulting and Wealth Preservation, Inc. & PERSPECTIV PLANNING, LLC
For over 40 Years, Jason H. Kurchner has been solving complex & repetitive tax problems, For Dentists, Physicians, Entrepreneurs, and Ultra Wealthy families. Reducing & Eliminating All Forms of Confiscatory Taxes when Liquidating Highly Appreciated Assets. He is also The Consulting National Director of Philanthropic Planning for the Orthodox Catholic Church. Jason is an active Lecturer & Instructs Courses to Attorneys, CPAs &, and Investment Advisors. Topics are: Proven Ways to Reduce & Eliminate Federal and State Income Tax, Capital Gains Taxes, Estate and GST Taxes. He is a specialist & Lead designer in Tax Planning for The Sale of a Professional Practice & Business.
Jason H. Kurchner, CFP, CEO
Sage Consulting & Wealth Preservation, Inc.
Darren Sugiyama
Premium Finance Specialist
Darren Sugiyama was born and raised in Long Beach, California, and received a bachelor’s degree from Loyola Marymount University, where he was also the team captain and 2nd Team All-Conference baseball player. He continued his education and earned a master’s degree in Multicultural Education from the University of Hawaii at Manoa.
After starting his career as a counselor in a gang prevention program in his hometown of Long Beach, California, worked as a teacher in the public school system in Honolulu, Hawaii, and as a counselor in Halawa Prison and the Honolulu Detention Home.
Darren Sugiyama started his own employee benefits firm in 2003 called Apex. In just seven years, Apex produced over $37 million in annual sales and was the #1 producing firm in the country for three different insurance carriers concurrently.
Since then, Darren expanded his insurance business portfolio, building a life insurance agency called DaVinci, which was responsible for 25% of all the life insurance policies sold for Pacific Life in Orange County, California in 2017. In 2018, DaVinci was responsible for 29% of all the life insurance policies sold for Penn Mutual in Orange County, and in 2019, over 38%.
In addition, Darren founded Lionsmark Capital in 2016 which is now one of the most dominant premium financing intermediary firms in the life insurance industry, and has built a reputation of being the most mathematically transparent firm in the business with proprietary back-testing software that analyzes 121 different 40-year historical periods of S&P 500 performance.
Darren is also an internationally acclaimed 12-time author with published works being distributed in Australia, Brazil, Canada, Croatia, Czechoslovakia, Denmark, India, Italy, Japan, New Zealand, Norway, Singapore, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States of America.
As a nationally acclaimed motivational speaker, business coach, and mentor, Darren does both live and virtual motivational speaking events, as well as private coaching sessions, teaching others how he built his businesses using extremely unorthodox methods.
Thomas began his career in financial services in 2000. He is an Advanced Planning Consultant at Proactive Tax Reductions. Prior to that, he was Chief Marketing and Chief Business Development Officer for Magnus Financial Group, an award-winning independent Registered Investment Advisor with headquarters in New York.
Thomas is relied upon by a network of advisors throughout the country for his advanced tax planning knowledge. He applies a multidisciplinary approach to solving complex tax problems and is the architect of a variety of esoteric planning strategies which combine a variety of planning solutions to mitigate taxes, optimize enterprise value and enhance asset protection. In this capacity, Thomas serves as an outsourced Advanced Planning Consultant to Magnus Financial Group, AEG Member Firms, Fortune Tax Alliance, TaxVisory and Trust-CFO.
Thomas is also a Founding Member of Advisors Equity Group (AEG), an innovative equity-owned think tank made up of financial service professionals and centers of influence from around the world. He is a Legacy Member of the National Association of Cash Flow Advisors (NACFA). He holds his Life, Accident & Health Insurance license and is actively working on his Certified Exit Planning Advisor (CEPA) and Certified Digital Asset Advisor (CDAA) credentials.
Thomas graduated from Cornell University and while there he balanced his time between academics and athletics, playing linebacker on the varsity football team and a member of the Sphinx Head Society. Thomas resides in the College Grove, Tennessee with his partner Jennifer and their two children.