Founder & Generational Wealth Creation Architect
Edward Collins
JD, CFP®, AAMS, RFC · Founder, President & CEO · Uplevel By Design, LLC
For nearly 30 years, Edward Collins has worked at the intersection of tax, estate, and business law, financial planning, and wealth architecture … helping thousands of high-income earners and families build the structures that preserve, protect, grow, and transfer wealth by design. In the Game of Wealth, he is both a player and a coach.
What I Do
I teach self-made family business owners … the ones who don’t come from the world of finance … how to win the Game of Wealth. Without an MBA, which won’t help. And without the seven-figure payroll it takes to run your own private family office. I want to help you compete with the ultra-wealthy by learning the rules of a game you didn’t know you were playing.
Edward Collins
The Origin
It started in a public library.
Before the social platforms … before the education reached an audience in the millions … Edward Collins was running financial-literacy workshops at public libraries. Not for wealthy clients. For ordinary people … teaching them the same strategies the ultra-wealthy had used for over a century.
That is where this started. Not in a boardroom. Not on a stage. In a library, with a whiteboard and a room full of people who deserved better than what the internet’s “financial gurus” were handing them.
Information leads to education. But education by itself doesn’t lead to transformation. The only thing that leads to transformation is taking action.
That conviction … education that leads to implementation … is what Uplevel By Design was built on. Not a coaching company. Not a content brand. A wealth-architecture firm that teaches, then executes.
Career
The path to one integrated firm.
Department of Justice
Serves at the DOJ and sees behind the curtain … how enforcement and government systems actually operate. Learns quickly that government work is not for him.
Enters financial planning & investment advisory
Begins his career in financial services, building foundational expertise in planning and professional investment management.
Certified Financial Planner®
Earns the CFP® designation and deepens his expertise in multi-generational estate planning, advanced financial planning, and investment management for high-net-worth families.
Launches a tax-preparation practice
Answers a need his Clients keep raising … and builds a tax practice grounded in strategy, not just compliance.
Launches a bookkeeping firm
Builds a bookkeeping business to help his business-owner Clients gain mastery over their numbers.
Launches a Fractional CFO business
Brings advanced financial planning & analysis to owners not yet ready to hire a full-time CFO.
Quasi-retirement
After building and scaling companies that run without him, Edward steps back … to travel with his wife, start a family, and work through a bucket list.
Seton Hall University School of Law
Earns his Juris Doctor (JD), adding legal grounding to his financial-planning and wealth-management credentials. The combination becomes the foundation of UBD’s integrated approach.
Rebuilds the platform
Returns to the businesses that were running without him, bringing along a renewed mission, and begins evolving Uplevel By Design into its current form … a fractional, virtual, multi-family office.
Social-media ignition
Grows from less than 6,000 followers to millions across platforms … 100% organic, driven by credentialed, substantive education. No paid promotion. No hype. Just depth.
Uplevel By Design, LLC
Leads a fractional, virtual, multi-family office serving high-income earners through coordinated tax strategy, asset protection, wealth accumulation, and intentional legacy.
Philosophy
“Wealth isn’t what happens to you. It’s what you design.”
The ultra-wealthy don’t leave their financial lives to chance. They build structures … entities, trusts, tax strategy, protection layers … that work together as one system. Edward’s mission is to bring that same architecture to every Client the Uplevel Team serves.
Education at scale
Work With The Team
Edward designs the architecture. The Uplevel Team builds it with and for you.
You’ve seen how he thinks. Here’s where it gets built … the coordinated wealth architecture, designed and implemented around one plan.
Explore Uplevel Protégé →