Chris Martin

Chris Martin is a Senior Estate Planning Associate at ArchAngel Trust and Probate, APC., bringing more than twenty years of experience helping families work through complex estate planning questions. Since joining the firm, Chris has become the associate clients are routed to when a plan gets technically complicated — multiple entities, a closely held business, a blended family, or a set of financial accounts that don't line up cleanly with what the estate documents intend. His extensive financial background gives him a rare vantage point on those situations: he doesn't just see the estate plan in isolation, he sees how a given decision ripples into the client's financial plan and their tax plan, and he plans accordingly.

Before ArchAngel, Chris built a career around a simple throughline: helping people make good decisions under complicated circumstances. That experience wasn't confined to a desk. Chris is an entrepreneur through and through, and the businesses he's built and run over the years shape how he approaches every client relationship — he has personally sat on both sides of the table, as the owner making the hard call and helping someone else make it. That dual perspective is most visible in the area of the practice he's most drawn to: business succession planning. Chris takes real satisfaction in sitting down with a business owner who is beginning to think about life after the business they built — what happens to it, who takes it over, and how that transition gets woven into the rest of their estate plan. It's not an abstract exercise for him. He understands, from firsthand experience, what it means to have built something and to eventually have to think seriously about handing it off.

That combination — technical estate planning fluency plus an entrepreneur's instinct for how a business actually runs — is why Chris takes the lead role on ArchAngel Trust and Probate's more technical estate planning matters. Where a plan involves layered tax considerations, a business interest that needs to be accounted for, or a tax and estate picture that have drifted out of sync with each other, Chris is typically the one leading the work. He coordinates closely with the rest of the ArchAngel Trust and Probate, APC. team, and with clients' outside CPAs and financial professionals, to make sure every part of the plan — the documents, the entity structure, the tax exposure, and the succession timeline — is pointed in the same direction.

Chris's planning philosophy is straightforward: an estate plan is only as good as its coordination with everything else going on in a client's financial life. A trust or a will can be drafted perfectly and still fail a family if the business interest inside it isn't structured for a clean transition, or if the tax consequences of a transfer haven't been thought through in advance. Chris's role is to catch those gaps before they become problems — to look at a client's full picture and make sure the estate plan, the financial plan, and the tax plan are all telling the same story.

His approach to client service starts with listening. Chris has learned, over two decades of doing this work, that the technical part of the plan only works if it's built on an accurate understanding of what the client is actually trying to accomplish — for their family, and often for a business they've spent a lifetime building. He takes the time to understand a client's full situation before recommending a path forward, and he stays involved through the technical details that a plan like this requires, rather than handing a client off once the first conversation is over. For business owners in particular, that often means walking alongside them through a process that can be as emotional as it is technical: thinking through what it means to eventually step back from the thing they've spent their working life building.

Chris holds a Bachelor of Arts in Business, with a concentration in Management, from Western Governors University, and a certificate in Financial Planning from Boston University — academic training that underpins the financial fluency he brings to every estate planning engagement.