Analyzing US Private Credit Fund Lock Up Periods

Private credit now dominates the high-end retirement income conversation. You sit with an advisor, stare at the anemic yields of traditional municipal bonds, and feel a deep sense of arithmetic panic. The advisor then slides a glossy prospectus across the oak desk. The document promises double-digit yields generated from senior secured corporate loans. It looks like financial gravity has been suspended for your benefit. They mention that the capital is tied up, but quickly reassure you that quarterly redemption windows provide all the liquidity you will realistically need. This is the exact moment your financial plan either solidifies or fractures entirely. The promise of semi-liquid private credit is currently failing its first major structural stress test. Understanding the rigid lock up periods governing these specific investments requires tearing apart the marketing brochures and staring directly at the mechanics of illiquidity. You cannot buy groceries with a locked asset. You cannot fund emergency medical care with a prorated redemption request. The yield is entirely real, but the liquidity is conditional.

Wall Street built a massive distribution machine to funnel retail wealth into the middle market corporate lending space. Trillions of dollars moved from bank balance sheets into private funds over the last decade. High-net-worth individuals, desperately seeking income, bought into business development companies and interval funds managed by massive institutions. They accepted the terms without truly reading them. A lock up period is not a suggestion. It is a legally binding contract that allows the fund manager to deny your request for your own money. When markets are calm, the exit doors remain wide open. When credit markets crack, those doors slam shut with terrifying speed. Assessing your real downside risk means assuming you will be denied access to your capital at the exact moment you need it most.

The New Yield Engine for Retirement Portfolios

Retirees face a mathematics problem. They need to generate enough cash flow to survive thirty years without depleting their principal. For decades, a simple ladder of United States Treasury bonds and high-grade corporate debt solved this problem. The math worked. That historical anomaly ended long ago. The search for acceptable yield drove capital further out on the risk curve, straight into the arms of private alternative asset managers.

Why Private Credit Replaced Traditional Fixed Income

Following the 2008 financial crisis, federal regulators forced traditional banks to hold more capital against their high-risk corporate loans. The banks responded rationally. They abandoned the middle market. If a manufacturing company in Ohio needed fifty million dollars to expand an assembly line, the local commercial bank refused to underwrite the loan. Private equity firms stepped into the void. They raised massive pools of capital to lend directly to these companies. The rules that pushed banks out of this space have not eased up. A recent Federal Reserve study confirmed that banks now prefer to lend money directly to the private credit funds rather than compete with them on the ground. It pays better to fund the funds than to make the loans directly. This shift is permanent. Private direct lending completely replaced the traditional syndicated loan market for mid-sized American companies.

The Yield Versus Liquidity Trade-Off

The core proposition of private credit relies entirely on a single economic principle. You surrender liquidity, and the market pays you a premium for your sacrifice. A company borrowing fifty million dollars from a private fund agrees to pay an interest rate significantly higher than they would pay in the public bond market. The borrower accepts the higher rate because the private fund offers speed, certainty of execution, and highly customized loan terms. The investor funding that loan collects the extra yield specifically because they cannot sell the loan easily. You are getting paid strictly because you are trapped.

The Institutional Premium

University endowments and sovereign wealth funds understand this trade-off perfectly. They operate with infinite time horizons. A large pension fund will gladly lock up two hundred million dollars in a closed-end private credit fund for ten years. They demand a strict, legally binding illiquidity premium to compensate them for the lack of access. They do not expect to see their principal returned a day before the decade expires. They build their cash flow models around that exact, rigid timeline. They do not panic when the market drops because their capital is structurally immune to short-term market psychology.

The Retail Investor Migration

Retail investors fundamentally misunderstand the premium. They want the double-digit yield normally reserved for institutional capital, but they refuse to give up daily liquidity. Wealth management firms recognized this cognitive dissonance and engineered new financial wrappers to solve it. They created interval funds and non-traded business development companies specifically to sell illiquid assets to people who demand liquidity. Recent survey data shows family offices doubling their private credit allocations from two percent to four percent in a single year. These individuals assume they are outsmarting the system by getting institutional yields with retail exit ramps. They are wrong. The underlying asset dictates the actual liquidity, regardless of the wrapper.

Unpacking the Mechanics of Fund Lock Ups

When you sign the subscription documents for a private credit vehicle, you agree to a highly specific set of rules governing your capital. The fund manager operates under a fiduciary duty to protect the entire pool of assets, not to ensure your personal convenience. If granting your withdrawal request harms the remaining investors in the fund, the manager will deny your request without hesitation. Understanding the exact mechanics of the lock up prevents catastrophic miscalculations during retirement planning.

Hard Lock Ups Versus Soft Lock Ups

A hard lock up means your money is gone until the fund chooses to return it. You have absolutely zero contractual right to demand a withdrawal. The manager deploys the capital, collects the interest, distributes the dividends, and returns the principal only when the underlying loans mature. A soft lock up introduces conditional access. You can ask for your money back during specific windows, but the fund imposes a severe early withdrawal penalty. If you demand a redemption in year two of a soft lock up, the fund might subtract a three percent fee straight off the top of your principal. This fee gets deposited back into the fund to compensate the remaining shareholders for the logistical friction of liquidating assets prematurely to pay you out. Wall Street invented soft lock ups specifically because high-net-worth clients aggressively rejected hard lock ups.

The Role of the Business Development Company

Congress created the Business Development Company structure decades ago to spur investment in small domestic enterprises. Asset managers like Apollo, Blackstone, and Blue Owl completely co-opted the structure to build massive retail lending empires. A BDC operates like a closed-end investment company, but it must invest at least seventy percent of its assets in eligible, private US companies. Crucially, a BDC must distribute at least ninety percent of its taxable income to shareholders to avoid corporate taxation. This mandatory distribution rule creates the massive yields that attract retirees.

Traded Versus Non-Traded Structures

Publicly traded BDCs list on major stock exchanges. You can buy and sell shares of Ares Capital or FS KKR Capital every minute the market is open. This provides true daily liquidity. However, the stock price fluctuates wildly based on market sentiment, often disconnecting completely from the actual book value of the underlying loans. During a panic, you might have to sell your shares at a twenty percent discount to their true value. Non-traded BDCs sit quietly on your brokerage statement. The price never seems to move. It updates monthly based on the manager's internal valuation models. It looks safe. It is not safe. It is just intentionally opaque. You cannot see the market panic because there is no ticker symbol flashing red on a screen.

The Illusion of Stable Net Asset Value

Asset managers mark their own homework. Since the underlying corporate loans do not trade on a public exchange, the manager uses internal models and third-party valuation firms to determine their worth. If a borrower starts struggling and misses a cash flow projection, the manager might delay marking down the value of the loan, assuming the company will recover next quarter. The Net Asset Value stays flat. Retirees look at the flat line on their monthly statement and incorrectly assume they own a risk-free bond alternative. They actually own high-risk corporate debt priced by the exact people collecting the management fees. The stability is an accounting illusion.

The Rise of the Interval Fund Structure

The interval fund is the mechanism that unleashed the retail private credit boom. It is a specific type of registered investment company that periodically offers to repurchase a stated portion of its shares from investors. It legally bridges the gap between illiquid assets and retail cash demands. You hand over your capital, and the prospectus outlines a specific schedule of exit windows. It sounds like a perfect compromise. It operates flawlessly during bull markets.

The Promise of Quarterly Liquidity

The marketing pitch for an interval fund relies entirely on the perception of access. You agree to the initial terms, but the manager promises to open a redemption window every ninety days. If you decide you want out, you submit a tender request before the deadline. The fund calculates the current Net Asset Value, liquidates the necessary amount of cash, and deposits the funds into your brokerage account a few weeks later. This quarterly rhythm lulls investors into a false sense of security. They begin treating the interval fund exactly like a liquid mutual fund.

The Five Percent Redemption Gate

The fine print written by corporate attorneys destroys the marketing pitch. The fund only promises to buy back a specific maximum percentage of the total outstanding shares per quarter. The industry standard is five percent. That five percent cap applies to the entire fund, not your personal account. If the fund manages eighty billion dollars, they will only buy back four billion dollars worth of shares in a single quarter. If total investor requests exceed that four billion dollar limit, the math breaks immediately. The manager invokes the gate.

When the Gate Slams Shut

The manager enforces the redemption gate to protect the portfolio. They do not have a choice. You cannot expect an operations manager running a specialized HVAC supply warehouse outside of Omaha to refinance their debt on a whim just because a group of retail investors in Florida suddenly want to buy a boat. The underlying loans have five-year maturities. The manager cannot force the borrower to pay early. If the fund does not have enough cash on hand to meet the massive surge in redemption requests, they hit the five percent limit and stop processing payments.

Pro-Rata Distributions and Trapped Capital

When requests exceed the five percent cap, the fund prorates the distributions. If you ask for one hundred thousand dollars, and the total requests are double the available cash limit, the fund sends you fifty thousand dollars. The remaining fifty thousand dollars stays locked inside the fund. You have to wait another ninety days to submit a new request for the remainder. By the time the next quarter arrives, the panic has usually spread, and even more investors line up at the exit. The queue grows longer. Your capital is trapped inside a vehicle specifically designed to protect the asset manager from a run on the bank.

Case Studies in Semi-Liquid Credit Vehicles

We do not have to guess how these structures behave during periods of elevated stress. The market recently provided explicit, highly public case studies involving the largest asset managers on the planet. The behavior of these specific funds provides a clear roadmap for how your own capital will be treated when credit conditions tighten. The theoretical risk is now an observable historical fact.

Blackstone BCRED and the Retail Tsunami

Blackstone operates the massive BCRED private credit fund. It is an absolute behemoth in the non-traded BDC space, managing tens of billions of dollars. Early in the first quarter of recent market testing, the fund faced a brutal retail run. Investors submitted redemption requests totaling roughly 7.9 percent of the total fund value. This represented nearly four billion dollars of capital demanding an immediate exit. The requests blew right past the standard five percent cap. The underlying corporate loans were performing adequately, but the retail base got spooked by broader macroeconomic headlines and wanted out simultaneously.

Managing Repurchase Limits

Blackstone faced a massive public relations crisis. Enforcing the strict five percent limit would have triggered a media firestorm and terrified their wealth management distribution network. Financial advisors stop selling products that trap their clients. To prevent a panic, Blackstone aggressively managed the repurchase limits. They legally raised the tender offer limit for that specific quarter to seven percent. They bent their own structural rules to satisfy the angry mob and protect their reputation in the retail channel.

Sponsor Capital Injections to Save Face

Bending the rules required actual, physical cash. To cover the massive shortfall without selling off their best loans at distressed prices, Blackstone injected four hundred million dollars of its own corporate capital directly into the fund. Senior leaders personally put up over a hundred million dollars of their own money. They bought the shares specifically to provide exit liquidity to the retail investors. Think about the implications of this action. If a massive fund requires an emergency cash injection from the corporate sponsor just to handle a routine quarterly redemption cycle during a relatively calm economic period, the interval structure is fundamentally flawed.

Blue Owl and the Reality of Illiquidity

Blue Owl faced the exact same problem with their non-traded vehicle, OBDC II. They experienced a similar surge in redemption requests from anxious investors. Instead of injecting their own corporate capital to mask the structural flaw, Blue Owl took a completely different approach. They stopped pretending the fund was semi-liquid.

Suspending Redemptions Entirely

Blue Owl permanently ended quarterly redemptions for the fund. The exit door was welded shut overnight. Investors lost their access instantly. The theoretical liquidity described in the glossy marketing brochure vanished the exact moment actual stress hit the system. This event proves that "semi-liquid" is a marketing term, not a financial guarantee. If a manager decides that honoring redemptions will force them to sell assets at a loss, they will always choose to trap the investors rather than destroy the portfolio.

The Shift to Periodic Capital Distributions

To generate cash for the trapped investors, Blue Owl aggressively sold roughly six hundred million dollars worth of loans. They dumped over thirty percent of their portfolio to raise capital and switched the fund to a periodic distribution model. You get your money back only when they decide to give it back, usually as underlying loans mature or get refinanced. The investor lost all agency over their own capital timing. This is the unvarnished reality of private credit. You are a passenger, not the driver.

Tax Implications of Private Credit Distributions

A ten percent yield printed on a marketing sheet rarely survives contact with the Internal Revenue Service. Private credit funds generate their massive yields by collecting interest payments from corporate borrowers. The IRS treats this specific type of cash flow very aggressively. If you do not understand the tax characteristics of these distributions, you will destroy a massive portion of your total return before the money ever hits your checking account.

Ordinary Income Versus Qualified Dividends

When you buy shares of a large public company like Apple or Microsoft, the dividends they pay usually count as qualified dividends. The federal government taxes qualified dividends at a favorable maximum rate of twenty percent. BDC distributions and private credit fund payouts do not receive this preferential treatment. The vast majority of the yield generated by these funds is classified as ordinary income. The IRS taxes ordinary income at your highest marginal federal tax bracket, plus any applicable state taxes.

The Drag of Tax Inefficiency on Yield

The math is brutal for high earners. If you sit in the top federal tax bracket, your marginal rate hits 37 percent, plus the 3.8 percent net investment income tax. That pushes your federal tax burden to 40.8 percent. If your private credit fund pays a ten percent gross yield, the government takes four percent. Your actual take-home yield drops to roughly six percent. If you live in a high-tax state like California or New York, your net yield compresses even further. Taking on the massive illiquidity risk of private corporate debt to generate a five or six percent net return is a terrible mathematical trade.

Asset Location Strategy for High Earners

You cannot change the tax code, but you can change where you hold the asset. Asset location dictates that highly tax-inefficient investments belong inside tax-advantaged accounts. You must hold private credit funds inside a traditional IRA or a Roth IRA. Inside an IRA, the massive ordinary income distributions compound completely tax-free. You only pay taxes when you eventually withdraw the money in retirement. If you hold a non-traded BDC in a standard taxable brokerage account, you are making a massive strategic error. You are actively subsidizing the federal government with your yield premium.

Calculating Net After-Tax Returns

Before committing capital to a lock up period, force your financial advisor to calculate the exact net after-tax return based on your specific state of residence and income bracket. Do not accept the gross yield numbers. Compare the true after-tax yield of the illiquid private credit fund directly against the tax-equivalent yield of a highly liquid municipal bond fund. If the spread between the two is less than three hundred basis points, the private credit fund is not compensating you adequately for the lack of liquidity. Walk away.

Integrating Illiquid Credit into a Withdrawal Strategy

Retirement income planning requires matching your physical cash needs against your asset liquidity. You have to pay property taxes in November. You have to pay medical premiums every single month. Your liabilities are strictly scheduled. If you back those scheduled liabilities with assets that suffer from lock up periods and redemption gates, you introduce catastrophic friction into your life.

The Danger of Sequence of Returns Risk

Sequence of returns risk typically applies to the stock market. If you retire the day before the S&P 500 crashes thirty percent, selling shares to fund your lifestyle permanently destroys your portfolio. Private credit introduces a different, more insidious type of sequence risk. If you rely on the quarterly distributions from an interval fund to pay your bills, and the fund suddenly suspends redemptions and slashes its dividend due to loan defaults, your income stream stops completely. You are forced to sell your liquid equities at the exact wrong time to bridge the gap. The illiquidity of the credit fund forces you to make terrible decisions elsewhere in your portfolio.

Matching Duration with Liability

You solve this problem through strict duration matching. You only assign capital to an illiquid private credit fund if you have absolutely zero intention of spending that specific money for at least five to seven years. You treat the asset as dead money. It sits on the balance sheet generating yield, but it does not factor into your short-term cash flow projections. You fund your immediate three years of living expenses using cash equivalents, short-term Treasuries, and highly liquid public bonds.

The Core and Satellite Approach

Institutional managers use a core and satellite approach for private markets. The core of your fixed-income portfolio remains highly liquid and secure. The private credit allocation acts as a specialized satellite designed purely to boost the overall yield of the total portfolio. If the satellite gets locked up or faces a redemption gate, your core living expenses remain completely unaffected. You do not panic because your daily survival does not depend on the specific actions of the asset manager.

Sizing the Private Credit Allocation Correctly

Proper sizing provides the ultimate defense against lock up periods. Current wealth management surveys show intelligent family offices capping their total exposure to private credit at roughly five to ten percent of their total liquid net worth. If you have a two million dollar portfolio, assigning one hundred thousand dollars to a non-traded BDC makes mathematical sense. It bumps the yield without risking the structural integrity of the plan. Planners who allocate twenty or thirty percent of a client's portfolio to semi-liquid credit vehicles are guilty of financial malpractice. They are prioritizing current yield over terminal safety.

Evaluating the Underlying Loan Quality

A lock up period is only acceptable if the underlying assets actually survive the duration of the lock up. The yield generated by private credit funds comes directly from the balance sheets of middle market companies. If those companies collapse under the weight of higher interest rates, your locked capital burns. You have to look past the brand name of the fund manager and examine the exact specific quality of the loans they are underwriting.

Default Rates in Direct Lending

Historically, direct lending portfolios exhibited exceptional resilience. Data from firms like Cambridge Associates often shows private credit default rates running near 1.45 percent, significantly lower than the 3.37 percent default rate seen in broadly syndicated public loans. Private managers negotiate stronger protections and work directly with the borrower to restructure debt before a formal bankruptcy occurs. However, those historical metrics reflect a decade of zero interest rates. With the base Secured Overnight Financing Rate sitting near 4.3 percent, the cost of debt has doubled for these small companies. The historical default rate is not a reliable predictor of future performance under current monetary conditions.

Payment In Kind and Hidden Stress

The most alarming metric in current private credit portfolios is the explosion of Payment In Kind terms. PIK allows a corporate borrower to stop paying their interest in cash. Instead, they simply add the owed interest to the principal balance of the loan. The fund manager recognizes this PIK interest as income and pays a dividend to you, but no actual cash changed hands. Recent data shows PIK usage hitting eleven percent of total deals in some funds, up from roughly six percent just a few years ago. This is a massive warning sign. PIK masks severe underlying financial stress. It keeps the loan looking healthy on paper while the borrower slowly bleeds out.

Software and Artificial Intelligence Sector Exposure

Private credit funds aggressively pursued technology companies over the last five years. Current estimates show software and technology loans making up between nineteen and twenty-five percent of major private credit portfolios. These companies often lack hard physical assets to pledge as collateral. The loan is backed entirely by their recurring software revenue. If a massive disruption in artificial intelligence renders a specific software product obsolete, the company's revenue vanishes instantly. Analysts at major banks recently modeled scenarios showing double-digit default rates in these specific sectors if tech spending contracts. A fund heavily concentrated in software debt carries extreme downside risk.

The Danger of Covenant-Lite Loans

During the peak of the private credit boom, competition between asset managers grew so intense that they started abandoning traditional loan protections to win deals. They issued covenant-lite loans. A traditional loan forces the borrower to maintain strict debt-to-income ratios and gives the lender the right to step in the moment the company misses a metric. Covenant-lite loans strip away these early warning systems. The manager cannot intervene until the company actually misses a payment, which is usually far too late to salvage the capital. If you lock your money in a fund packed with covenant-lite, PIK-heavy software loans, you are holding a ticking time bomb.

The Secondary Market for Private Credit

If you find yourself trapped in a fund with a suspended redemption program, your options are incredibly limited. You cannot call the manager and demand an exception. You cannot sue the fund for enforcing the terms you signed. Your only path to liquidity involves the secondary market. You must find an institutional buyer willing to take your locked shares off your hands. This transaction never ends well for the seller.

Selling at a Discount to Net Asset Value

Institutional secondary buyers operate like pawn shops for distressed wealth. They know you are desperate for cash, and they price their offers accordingly. If your statement says your shares are worth one hundred thousand dollars, the secondary buyer will not pay you one hundred thousand dollars. They will offer you eighty or eighty-five cents on the dollar. You accept a massive, permanent haircut simply to escape the lock up period. The discount reflects the risk the institutional buyer assumes by taking on the illiquid asset during a period of market stress.

The Cost of Early Exits

An advisor in Scottsdale selling non-traded BDCs to retirees assumes the secondary market will always exist to bail out their mistakes. It will not. During a true liquidity crisis, the secondary buyers disappear completely. They hoard their own cash rather than buying distressed shares. If you commit to a lock up period, you must internalize the fact that early exits are either prohibitively expensive or physically impossible. The secondary market is a punitive last resort, not a reliable exit strategy.

Personal Reflections on Managing Liquidity

When I sat down to structure the core retirement frameworks for Derhems, the very first assumption I threw out was the idea of semi-liquidity. I kept seeing financial plans built on a house of cards. Planners would assign a massive percentage of a client's net worth to private credit interval funds, treating those assets as if they could be tapped on a Tuesday afternoon without friction. It made the yield numbers look fantastic on the projection software. It also exposed the client to total ruin if they needed cash during a credit contraction. I decided early on that we would treat every single private credit investment as entirely illiquid. If the money goes into a non-traded BDC, we assume it is locked away for seven years. Period. If the fund happens to honor a quarterly redemption request, we treat it as a pleasant surprise, not a structural expectation.

I distinctly remember arguing with a wholesaler from a major asset management firm about this specific vulnerability. He kept pointing to their track record of honoring every single redemption request for five years straight. I asked him what would happen if a severe recession hit and ten percent of his retail base demanded their cash simultaneously. He deflected, muttered something about their large cash buffer, and tried to steer the conversation back to their historical yield premium. He knew the structural flaw existed, but his compensation was tied directly to ignoring it. You cannot afford to ignore it. The yield is compensation for giving up control of your capital. If you demand the control back, you forfeit the yield. You cannot have both.

The private credit market is not inherently bad. It is a highly effective machine for transferring institutional wealth to private companies. The danger only arises when individual investors mistake these complex funds for high-yield savings accounts. I own private credit funds. I allocate capital to direct lending. I just do it with money I know I will not need to touch for a decade. Taking a position requires accepting the absolute reality of the asset class. If you buy a ten-year illiquid loan, expect to wait ten years to see your principal. Stop relying on the quarterly exit ramp. One day, the door will simply be locked.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a lock up period in a private credit fund?

A lock up period is a legally binding timeframe during which you cannot withdraw your invested capital from the fund. The manager requires this time to lend your money to private companies, collect the interest payments, and wait for the loans to mature. Attempting to withdraw funds during this period is usually prohibited or subject to severe financial penalties.

How does a five percent quarterly redemption gate work?

Many interval funds promise quarterly liquidity, but they cap the total amount of money they will return at five percent of the fund's total net asset value. If too many investors ask for their money at the same time and the requests exceed this five percent limit, the fund prorates the payouts. You receive only a fraction of what you requested, and the rest of your money remains locked in the fund.

Why did major asset managers recently suspend redemptions on their interval funds?

During periods of economic stress, retail investors often panic and attempt to pull their money out of semi-liquid funds simultaneously. If the fund cannot sell its underlying private loans fast enough to generate the required cash without taking massive losses, the manager will permanently suspend the redemption program to protect the integrity of the remaining portfolio, trapping the investors' capital.

Are dividends from non-traded BDCs taxed as capital gains?

No. The vast majority of the yield generated by Business Development Companies and private credit funds is taxed as ordinary income, not qualified dividends or capital gains. This means the distributions are taxed at your highest marginal federal income tax bracket. Holding these funds in a standard taxable brokerage account results in massive tax inefficiency.

What is payment in kind (PIK) interest and why is it risky?

PIK interest allows a corporate borrower to add their owed interest payments to the principal balance of the loan instead of paying cash to the fund. While the fund manager records this as income and maintains a stable net asset value, no actual cash is generated. A rising rate of PIK usage in a private credit portfolio strongly indicates that the underlying borrowers are struggling to manage their debt.

Can I sell my private credit fund shares on a secondary market?

If the fund suspends redemptions, your only option is to sell your shares to an institutional buyer on the secondary market. However, these buyers demand a massive discount to provide liquidity. You will typically have to sell your shares for eighty or eighty-five cents on the dollar, taking a permanent loss simply to escape the lock up period.

How much of my retirement portfolio should be allocated to illiquid credit?

Due to the severe lack of liquidity and sequence of returns risk, conservative financial planners generally cap private credit exposure at five to ten percent of an investor's total liquid net worth. You should only allocate capital that you are absolutely certain you will not need to spend for at least five to seven years.

Does an interval fund guarantee liquidity after the initial lock up?

No. An interval fund never guarantees liquidity. It only guarantees that the manager will offer to buy back a specific, limited percentage of shares on a scheduled basis, provided the fund has the available cash and the requests do not exceed the stated gate. The manager always retains the legal right to suspend the repurchase program if market conditions deteriorate.

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Legal Disclaimer: The information provided in this article is for educational and informational purposes only and does not constitute financial, investment, legal, or tax advice. Private credit funds, interval funds, and non-traded Business Development Companies carry significant risks, including the potential for total loss of principal and severe illiquidity. You should always consult with a licensed, fiduciary financial advisor and a qualified tax professional before making any decisions regarding your asset allocation, retirement strategy, or private market investments.