Willow Wealth (Yieldstreet) Review: What the Rebrand Doesn't Fix

This section establishes what Willow Wealth legally is, who controls it, and what it has raised, so the rest of the review can be read against the right entity.

The entities

Willow Wealth is a New York fintech, headquartered at 300 Park Avenue, that runs an online platform selling private-market investments to individuals. Three entities matter to you. Willow Wealth Inc. (formerly YieldStreet Inc.) is the parent and the operating company. Willow Asset Management LLC (formerly YieldStreet Management LLC) is an SEC-registered investment adviser; it manages the platform’s own funds and special purpose vehicles and, for the managed-portfolio product, advises retail clients directly. Willow Wealth Markets LLC (formerly YieldStreet Markets LLC, and before that RealCadre LLC, the broker-dealer that came with the Cadre acquisition) is a FINRA-member broker-dealer, BrokerCheck firm number 172295. The adviser’s Form CRS (CRD 282487) describes it as the manager of “the Willow Wealth funds” and the broker-dealer as its affiliate; both are wholly owned, directly or indirectly, by Willow Wealth Inc.

In one sentence: Willow Wealth is an issuer, an adviser and a broker at once. It creates the vehicle you buy, prices the deal it puts into that vehicle, charges the vehicle a management fee, and sells you the interest through its own broker-dealer. Hold that structure in mind whenever the platform describes itself as giving you “access” to private markets; on most of its historical offerings it was not a marketplace between you and a third party, it was the counterparty’s manager.

Founders, executives, owners

Yieldstreet was founded in 2015 by Milind Mehere, a co-founder of the advertising company Yodle, and Michael Weisz, who came from specialty finance. Mehere ran it as CEO from 2015 until July 11, 2023, when Weisz took over and Mehere became a senior adviser (PR Newswire, July 11, 2023). In early May 2025 the board replaced Weisz with Mitchell Caplan as interim chief executive (company blog, May 2025; WealthManagement.com, 2025). Caplan, the former ETrade chief executive, had joined Yieldstreet’s board in 2021 after Tarsadia Investments led the company’s $100M Series C, became chairman in 2024, and is president of Tarsadia (Tarsadia and Willow leadership pages, 2026). The company did not give a reason for the change; by 2026 its leadership page listed Caplan as CEO and chairman without the word interim. Both founders stayed on the board (Wikipedia, citing company statements, 2026). Mehere joined the board of Advisor360 in August 2024 and was named its CEO on June 4, 2026 (GlobeNewswire); Weisz was named CEO of Kamino, a Solana lending protocol, on September 15, 2026 (GlobeNewswire). Willow added Tom Williams as chief investment officer on June 2, 2026 and Larry Greenberg as president on June 23, 2026 (BusinessWire); Greenberg and Caplan had built and sold Telebanc to ETrade and Jefferson National to Nationwide.

The ownership point matters more than the org chart: the last capital raise was led by insiders. On June 2, 2025 it announced a $45M first close of a planned $60M Series D led by existing investors Tarsadia, Mayfair Equity Partners and Edison Partners, with Cordoba Advisory Partners and Kingfisher Investment Advisors, plus one new investor, RedBird Capital Partners (BusinessWire). On July 22, 2025 it said the round had closed at $77M (BusinessWire). The lead investor’s president is the CEO. That is neither illegal nor unusual for a company in trouble, but it means the people deciding whether to keep funding the platform are the people running it, and no valuation was disclosed for either close.

Scale, in the company’s own numbers

The platform reported “more than 500,000 members” and “over $6 billion” of cumulative investments in 2025 (company blog, Wikipedia). WealthManagement.com, reporting the Greenberg hire on June 29, 2026, put client assets invested through the platform at about $6.9B. These are cumulative dollars placed through the platform since 2015, not assets under management, and they include the Cadre book. Earlier statements gave $1B invested and $600M returned in 2022 alone (BusinessWire, January 19, 2023) and “nearly $5 billion invested”, “more than $2.1 billion returned” and “more than 430,000 members” by 2024 to 2025 (CNBC Select). Returned capital includes principal, so it says nothing about return. When Yieldstreet closed its acquisition of Cadre on January 23, 2024 (PR Newswire; the deal was announced November 30, 2023), it said the combined platforms had “more than $9.7 billion” of investment value, with $5.3B allocated and $3.1B returned. Cadre had sought funding at a valuation above $800M in 2017 (The Real Deal, June 1, 2017); Yieldstreet did not disclose the price, and Forbes reported on July 30, 2026 that Williams had sold Cadre “for more than $300 million”. Cadre’s founder Ryan Williams stayed as Cadre CEO and global head of institutional partnerships at the close; by July 30, 2026 Forbes was writing about his “next act after Cadre”, a private-credit data startup called Ellis, so he is gone.

This section walks the money from sign-up to exit and names who gets paid at each step.

Eligibility and onboarding

You create an account with an email address, complete identity verification, and link a bank account. Most offerings require you to attest to accredited-investor status: $200,000 of income ($300,000 joint) in each of the last two years, or $1M of net worth excluding your primary residence, under Rule 501 of Regulation D; offerings sold under Rule 506(c) require documentary verification rather than a checkbox. The Yieldstreet Alternative Income Fund, a registered closed-end interval fund, was the main door for non-accredited investors; as of March 18, 2026 its board suspended new sales, and as of August 25, 2026 it no longer exists. The three third-party evergreen funds added on December 4, 2025 carry a $10,000 minimum on the platform (BusinessWire); eligibility for each depends on its own prospectus and suitability rules rather than on Willow’s.

What you actually own

Willow’s help centre says offerings are structured one of two ways. In a special purpose vehicle (SPV), each investment is its own Delaware LLC, Willow Asset Management is the managing member, and you hold a membership interest in that LLC, which holds the loan, the property interest or the fund position. You get a Schedule K-1. In a borrower payment dependent note (BPDN), you buy a note issued by a Willow affiliate (YS AltNotes I LLC was the issuer named in the class action); the note pays you only if and when the underlying borrower pays the affiliate. You get a 1099. The distinction matters in a failure: in a BPDN you are an unsecured creditor of a Willow-controlled note issuer whose only asset is the underlying loan, and the Tecku class action was brought precisely by BPDN holders in YS AltNotes I.

For the registered products, you own shares of a Maryland closed-end fund (the Alternative Income Fund, until August 2026) or, through the platform, shares of a third-party interval fund with its own adviser and prospectus. For Willow 360, the managed-portfolio product launched in 2025, Willow Asset Management holds discretionary authority over a $25,000-minimum account and allocates it across the platform’s own products.

How a deal is sourced and priced

Yieldstreet’s model was to source deals from “originators”: specialty lenders and sponsors who bring a loan or a property and often keep a fee. The platform’s marine loans came through Four Wood Capital Advisors and a Lakhani-family borrower group in the UAE (CNBC, September 5, 2025); its art loans came through Athena Art Finance, which Yieldstreet bought from Carlyle in April 2019 for $170M (Artnet, April 2019); its legal-finance deals came through pre-settlement funders such as LawCash; and its real estate equity came from multifamily and development sponsors in the Sun Belt and Northeast during 2021 and 2022. Willow’s investment team sets the target return, the term and the fee on each offering. The price you pay is the price the platform sets; there is no competing bid and no independent pricing source.

Distributions, valuations and the platform’s cut

Distributions arrive to your Willow wallet as the underlying asset pays: monthly interest on notes, quarterly on the income fund, event-driven on legal finance and real estate. Valuations of the SPV interests are set by the manager. When a deal goes wrong the platform moves it to a “watchlist”, a status CNBC found on 23 of the 30 real estate deals it reviewed in August 2025, and eventually to “default” or “total loss”. The management fee is, per the help centre, “collected on the cashflows of offerings”: it is taken out of distributions before they reach you, and on a deal that produces no cashflow it accrues against whatever comes back in a workout. The platform also collects, on some offerings, an “annual access fee” for the technology, and on some deals a 0.5% originator fee. A first-year expense fee of $150 (SPV) or $100 (BPDN) and $70 (SPV) or $30 (BPDN) in later years is charged per vehicle. These amounts are from the help-centre article “What are the fees associated with investing on Willow Wealth?” as summarised by review sites in 2026; the page itself could not be fetched.

This section gives the menu as of September 17, 2026, and lists what has been closed.

Direct deals

• Real estate. Equity and debt positions in individual properties and small funds, usually $10,000 minimum, accredited only, 3 to 7 year terms. This is the line that produced the CNBC losses; the company said in August 2025 that its 2021 and 2022 real estate equity offerings were “significantly impacted” by rising rates. Cadre’s institutional deals were folded into the same menu after January 2024; As of September 2026 cadre.com carries Willow’s broker-dealer disclosures (a Regulation Best Interest disclosure dated April 1, 2025) rather than new offerings, and no new Cadre-branded originations could be identified in 2026.
• Private credit. Asset-backed and corporate loans through originators, typically $10,000 minimum, accredited, 1 to 4 year terms, with targeted yields in the high single digits to low teens on the offering pages visible in search results. The marine and oil-and-gas loans of 2018 to 2019 sat here.
• Legal finance. Pre-settlement plaintiff funding and law-firm loans, packaged into numbered funds (Legal Finance Fund III was open in 2025 to 2026). The Fund III page claims “over $345M across approximately 73 legal finance transactions, 62 of which have matured and repaid investors” (company offering page, undated, live in 2025 to 2026). That is the company’s claim, and no SEC filing exists against which to check it because the vehicles are private.
• Art. Art-backed loans (Diversified Art Debt Portfolio) and Art Equity Funds I through IV, the last anchored by works attributed on the offering page to Basquiat and Hirst. The company says Athena has originated over $620M of art-backed loans since 2015 (Willow offering pages, undated); it publishes no repayment or loss figure against that number.
• Venture and private equity. Occasional SPVs into late-stage companies and access to third-party funds; minimums $10,000 to $25,000.
• Short Term Notes. Three to nine month notes, $10,000 minimum or $5,000 for a first investment, accredited only, targeting about 5% annualised over nine months on the 2026 series visible in search results (Short Term Note Series CXXV). The proceeds fund the platform’s own warehouse of pending deals, which the help centre describes in “How does Willow Wealth use the money it raises in Short Term Notes?”. You are lending to Willow’s pipeline.

Funds and managed accounts

• Third-party evergreen funds, added December 4, 2025: Carlyle Tactical Private Credit Fund, StepStone Private Markets, and Goldman Sachs Real Estate Diversified Income Fund, together over $11.7B of assets, each at a $10,000 minimum with quarterly liquidity (BusinessWire). Their fees are in their own prospectuses, not on Willow’s fee page.
• Willow 360 Managed Portfolios, launched in 2025 as Yieldstreet 360: $25,000 minimum, a flat 1.25% advisory fee plus about 0.175% of underlying expenses (company page and help centre, 2026), allocated across the platform’s products.
• IRA accounts through Equity Trust, with a $50 setup fee and a balance-based annual custody fee under a negotiated schedule (Willow help centre; the schedule itself was not retrievable).

Closed or gone

• The Yieldstreet Alternative Income Fund (launched March 2020 as the Yieldstreet Prism Fund, the non-accredited flagship): new sales and repurchases suspended March 18, 2026; shareholders voted on July 31, 2026 to reorganise into Mount Logan’s Opportunistic Credit Interval Fund (SOFIX); closed August 25, 2026; the fund is being wound down and dissolved (SEC Forms 425 and DEFA14A, 2026; GlobeNewswire, August 25, 2026).
• Marine and vessel deconstruction loans, 2018 to 2019: $89M of principal, written off in September 2025.
• YS RE RAF I LLC, a Regulation A real estate fund managed by the adviser, with an offering circular dated February 24, 2022 for up to $75M a year (SEC Form 1-A): no 2025 or 2026 activity was found in search, and its status should be confirmed on EDGAR before assuming it is open.

This section counts every fee, then runs the arithmetic on a stated sum.

The layers

Management fee. The help centre gives 1% to 3% a year on Willow-managed offerings, charged on invested capital and “collected on the cashflows”. CNBC’s August 18, 2025 report put the typical figure at “about 2% of invested funds”. Some older reviews and the company’s earlier marketing gave a 0% to 2.5% range, with 0% applying to certain notes; the current help-centre range is the one to plan on. That is the central conflict in the structure: the manager is paid on what you put in, not on what you get back.

Originator fee. On some deals, 0.5% a year to the sourcing partner, disclosed on the offering page.

Access fee. The help centre says Willow “may collect an annual access fee for the technology and platform services”. The rate is deal-specific; where it applies it is a second annual charge on top of the management fee.

Expense fee per vehicle. $150 in year one and $70 a year thereafter for an SPV; $100 and $30 for a BPDN. On a $10,000 position held five years in an SPV that is $430, or 0.86% a year on average, before anything else.

Fund-level costs. For the Alternative Income Fund the adviser charged 1.00% a year of average net assets excluding cash and cash equivalents (fund prospectus, 2025), plus fund operating expenses; the fund’s Section 19(a) notices through 2025 disclosed that part of each quarterly distribution ($0.15 a share in December 2025) was a return of capital rather than income, and the audited split sits in the fiscal 2025 Form N-CSR, which we could not read directly. For the third-party evergreen funds, the Carlyle, StepStone and Goldman prospectuses govern; the fee depends on the share class Willow sells you, so find the class before the minimum.

Willow 360. 1.25% advisory plus about 0.175% underlying expenses, on top of whatever the underlying products charge.

IRA custody. $50 setup plus Equity Trust’s balance-tiered annual fee.

Exit. There is no secondary market, so there is no exit fee; there is also no exit. On the Alternative Income Fund, repurchases were at NAV with no fee, capped at 5% of shares a quarter.

What the fee page omits. Offering costs charged to the vehicle, legal and workout expenses, and the manager’s right to recover its costs from recoveries. The marine portfolio is the illustration: when the borrowers settled for $5M in August 2025, Willow told investors its litigation and enforcement expenses across four countries “well exceeds the entire settlement amount” and applied the $5M against them (CNBC, September 5, 2025). The fee schedule does not show that line, but it is the line that took the last $5M.

A worked example in dollars

Take $25,000 into a single Willow-managed real estate or credit SPV, held five years, with a target of 10% a year gross. That target is an assumption, chosen because it sits just above the 9.6% net IRR the platform claimed for matured deals through June 30, 2024 and inside the range its real estate equity pages advertised in 2021 and 2022. Fees: a 2.0% annual management fee (CNBC’s figure), a 0.5% originator fee, and the $150 then $70 expense fee. Assume the deal pays out in full at the end of year five, which is the best case.

• Gross return over five years at 10% compounded: $25,000 × 1.10^5 = $40,263, a gain of $15,263.
• Management fee at 2.0% of invested capital: $500 a year × 5 = $2,500.
• Originator fee at 0.5%: $125 a year × 5 = $625.
• Expense fee: $150 + $70 × 4 = $430.
• Total fees: $3,555, which is 23% of the gross gain.
• Net to you: $40,263 − $3,555 = $36,708, a gain of $11,708, which is a net annualised return of about 8.0% if every dollar comes back on time.

Now apply the realised record instead of the target. If the deal is one of the 4 in 30 that CNBC found declared a total loss, your net is negative $25,000 plus whatever fees were collected on the way down. If it is one of the 23 in 30 on the watchlist, you have an unknown recovery on an unknown date with fees still accruing. A portfolio of ten such deals that matches the CNBC sample, 13% total losses and 77% impaired, does not compound at 8%; it needs the survivors to beat their targets just to get back to zero.

Compare the same $25,000 in a plain alternative. At an assumed 4% a year in a money-market fund or Treasury bill ladder, a rate that approximates what short government paper paid through 2025 and that you should replace with the yield on the day you read this, five years gives $30,416, a gain of $5,416, with no fee, daily liquidity and no default risk. The Willow SPV beats that by about $6,300 in the best case and loses by about $30,400 in the worst. The question the fee stack forces is not whether 8% beats 4%; it is whether you are being paid enough for the 13% chance of zero, and whether the manager pricing that chance is the one that mispriced it in 2021.

This section sets what the platform said against what the filings, the courts and the reporters found.

What was claimed

Through 2024 the Yieldstreet site carried a performance page with a headline “net annualized return” of 9.6%. The footnote, which several reviewers quoted, defined it as an average net realised IRR on all matured investments, excluding Short Term Notes and structured notes, weighted by investment size, for investments made from July 1, 2015 through June 30, 2024, after management fees and expenses. Three words in that definition do the work: “matured”, “excluding” and “weighted”. Active deals were out, so a deal on the watchlist was invisible. Defaulted deals that had not resolved were out. Large deals counted more than small ones. The same page said that as of December 31, 2024, 2.7% of offerings had defaulted, 16 of 597, and a further 4.3% had a “modified outlook” (The Ways to Wealth, quoting the page). A chart on the page showed real estate at 9.4% annualised as of 2023 (CNBC, December 5, 2025).

What was realised

Marine loans, 2018 to 2019. Yieldstreet raised roughly $89M across vessel deconstruction and related marine offerings, secured on 13 ships. In April 2020 it terminated and sued the originator, Four Wood Capital Advisors, and pursued the Lakhani borrowers for fraud, alleging the ships had been scrapped and the proceeds diverted; in October 2020 the English High Court ordered the Lakhanis to pay nearly $77M (BusinessWire, October 6, 2020), a judgment that produced, five years later, a $5M settlement. The SEC found that by September 2019, when Yieldstreet sold a $14.5M vessel deconstruction offering, it already had information suggesting the borrower was not repaying prior loans, and did not disclose it (SEC order 33-11230, September 12, 2023). On September 5, 2025 the company told investors to expect losses on the full $89M after the borrowers settled for $5M that Willow kept against legal costs (CNBC). The class action put the defaulted marine principal at about $87M by early 2020; CNBC’s $89M is the figure we use.

Real estate, 2021 to 2024. CNBC’s August 18, 2025 investigation reviewed 30 real estate deals into which investors had put more than $370M (CNBC; the figure is repeated by Bisnow and The Real Deal the same day), and found 4 declared total losses, 23 on the watchlist, and $78M of defaults recognised in the prior year. The company had offered at least 55 real estate projects between 2021 and 2024. One investor, Justin Klish, told CNBC he lost $400,000 across two deals and filed an SEC complaint. On December 5, 2025 CNBC reported letters to investors in Houston and Nashville multifamily deals adding about $41M of losses, bringing its running tally to $208M. Summaries of that report give the Houston Multi-Family Equity fund as a full $21M loss after foreclosure and Stacks on Main in Nashville as an $18.2M equity loss with the member-loan tranche losing up to 60%; those two account for the $41M. A second Nashville deal, 2010 West End Avenue, sold in May 2025 for $112M against a $118.75M senior loan, wiping out about $35M across two funds (Yieldstreet’s May 2025 investor update; CNBC), and sits inside the earlier $78M. We could not read the CNBC pieces directly, so the deal-level figures are from secondary summaries of them.

The removed chart. In the weeks around the rebrand the company took down its public performance data. CNBC reported that the last version of the real estate chart showed negative 2% annualised for 2015 to 2025, down from 9.4% two years earlier. The Real Estate Crowdfunding Review, which had tracked the page, headlined its post “Rolling Back the Odometer”. As of September 17, 2026 there is no public, platform-wide realised return figure for Willow Wealth.

The registered fund. The Alternative Income Fund is the one product with audited numbers. Its fiscal 2025 annual report (Form N-CSR, filed 2026) shows a total return of 3.04% for the year ended December 31, 2025 and net assets of $135.9M; the semi-annual report shows 2.07% for the first half and a NAV per share of $9.24 at June 30, 2025 (Form N-CSRS). The fund launched on March 9, 2020 as the Yieldstreet Prism Fund at $10.00. So over five and a half years the flagship fund for non-accredited investors lost about 7.6% of NAV per share while paying out income, part of it a return of capital by its own Section 19(a) notices, and its 2025 return was below a money-market fund. It was also oversubscribed for redemptions: in the tender offer that opened on May 8, 2025, 2,159,284 shares were tendered and 451,932 accepted, about 21% (Schedule TO-I/A, 2025).

The gap, and why

The claimed 9.6% and the realised negative 2% are not two measurements of the same thing; they are two different populations. The claimed figure counted only deals that had already paid out. The deals that were going to fail had not failed yet when the page was written, and once they were on the watchlist they were excluded as “active”. A default rate of 2.7% by count at December 31, 2024 became a 13% total-loss rate and a 77% impairment rate by dollar-weighted sample eight months later, because the 2021 and 2022 real estate vintages were large, late and levered. This is survivorship bias in its purest form, and it is the reason we discount every matured-only IRR on every platform.

The second reason is structural. The manager earned its 2% on capital invested whether or not the deal worked, had a warehouse to fill (funded by the Short Term Notes) and a member base of 400,000-plus to sell to. Deals that “sold out in minutes” (unverified customer reports on Bogleheads and Reddit, 2023 to 2026) are what a platform optimised for velocity of capital looks like.

This section states how you get out, which on most of the platform is: you do not, until the asset pays.

Direct SPV and BPDN positions have no secondary market. Willow does not run one, does not make a market, and its terms do not oblige it to repurchase. The offering page gives a target term (3 to 9 months for Short Term Notes; 1 to 4 years for credit; 3 to 7 for real estate equity), and the actual term is whatever the borrower or the property produces. Investors in the 2018 and 2019 marine deals waited until September 2025, six to seven years, to be told the answer was zero; investors in the 2021 Nashville and Houston deals waited until December 2025. Watchlisted deals have no stated resolution date.

The Alternative Income Fund offered quarterly repurchases at NAV of up to 5% of outstanding shares, 20% a year, with pro-rata allocation when oversubscribed. The May 2025 tender filled about 21% of what was tendered. On March 18, 2026 the board suspended repurchases pending the SOFIX deal, so from March to August 2026 there was no exit at all. Since August 25, 2026 former AIF holders hold Class I shares of SOFIX, which offers quarterly repurchases of at least 5% of outstanding shares at NAV under Rule 23c-3 (SOFIX prospectus, January 28, 2026). SOFIX’s own minimum initial investment is $1,000,000 (prospectus), so a former AIF holder who wants to add to the position cannot do so directly at retail size. Mount Logan Management, a subsidiary of the listed credit manager Mount Logan Capital, is the adviser; Willow has a two-year transition services agreement worth $2M in cash and $1M in Mount Logan stock, after which its involvement ends (Mount Logan press release, March 19, 2026).

The third-party evergreen funds on the platform redeem quarterly at 5% under their own prospectuses; in the second quarter of 2026 BCRED, Apollo Debt Solutions and Cliffwater CCLFX received requests for 10% to 17% of shares against 5% caps and prorated them (fund filings and CNBC, June 2026).

If the platform fails, SPV interests survive because each LLC is a separate entity, but the managing member is a Willow subsidiary, and a bankrupt manager does not run workouts. BPDN holders are creditors of a Willow-affiliated note issuer. Registered fund shares are held by the fund’s custodian and are unaffected by the platform’s solvency; that is the one real structural protection on the menu, and as of September 2026 it applies only to the third-party funds.

This section names the form you will get for each structure and the traps in it.

SPVs are Delaware LLCs taxed as partnerships. You receive a Schedule K-1 (Form 1065) for each SPV, usually after March 15 and often after April 15, which means extensions. Income keeps its character: interest on a credit SPV is ordinary income; a real estate equity SPV passes through depreciation, rental income and, on sale, Section 1231 gain and unrecaptured Section 1250 gain taxed at up to 25%; a legal-finance SPV’s return is generally ordinary. A total loss on an SPV produces a capital loss, usually only when the LLC is dissolved, so investors in the 2021 deals written off in December 2025 may not be able to take the loss until the vehicle winds up. State filing follows the property: a Nashville or Houston deal can create Tennessee or Texas franchise-tax exposure at the entity level, and a multi-state credit SPV can generate nonresident filing obligations.

BPDNs and Short Term Notes pay interest reported on Form 1099-INT (or 1099-OID where the note is issued at a discount), taxed as ordinary income in the year received. A BPDN that is written off is a nonbusiness bad debt, deductible as a short-term capital loss under Section 166(d) only in the year it becomes wholly worthless, which the platform’s “watchlist” status does not establish.

The Alternative Income Fund was a regulated investment company under Subchapter M; you received a 1099-DIV, with the return-of-capital portion (the share disclosed on each Section 19(a) notice) reducing basis rather than being taxed, and a 1099-B for any shares tendered. The SOFIX reorganisation was structured as a tax-free reorganisation under Section 368, so AIF holders should carry their basis into the SOFIX Class I shares and should receive the fund’s Section 19(a) notices going forward.

Art. The 28% collectibles rate under Section 1(h)(4) applies to gains on art held directly or through a pass-through; Art Equity Fund interests held more than a year should expect that rate on sale gains, not the 20% rate. Art-backed loans are ordinary interest.

IRAs and UBTI. IRA accounts through Equity Trust can hold most Willow products. Debt-financed real estate equity inside an SPV can generate unrelated business taxable income under Sections 512 to 514, and an IRA with more than $1,000 of UBTI must file Form 990-T and pay tax at trust rates; ask before putting a levered real estate SPV in an IRA. Credit SPVs and notes generally produce interest, which is not UBTI unless debt-financed at the vehicle level.

A $10,000 SPV position can cost you a K-1, an extension, a state return and a wait of years to claim a loss, which is itself a fee.

This section names the risk that ends the investor, then gives the dated record.

The risk that ends you

The risk on Willow is not a single fraud; it is that you are buying an illiquid interest in a vehicle whose manager (a) selected the deal, (b) set its price and target, (c) earns its fee on your capital regardless of outcome, (d) marks the deal itself, (e) decides when to call it a loss, and (f) recovers its own costs from recoveries before you. Each of those steps has failed at least once in the record below. Add platform risk: the parent has been funded by insiders since 2025 and has sold its registered fund to a third party. If the parent fails, your SPV survives on paper and dies in practice, because no one is left to run the workout.

The dated record

September 2019 to September 2023, the SEC. On September 12, 2023 the SEC issued a settled cease-and-desist order against YieldStreet Inc. and YieldStreet Management LLC (Administrative Proceeding File No. 3-21651; Securities Act Release 33-11230; Advisers Act Release IA-6451). The order found that in September 2019 the firm sold a $14.5M vessel deconstruction offering without disclosing that it had information indicating the borrower might not be repaying prior loans, in violation of Sections 17(a)(2) and 17(a)(3) of the Securities Act and Sections 206(2) and 206(4) of the Advisers Act and Rule 206(4)-8. Yieldstreet neither admitted nor denied the findings and paid more than $1.9M in penalties, disgorgement and interest, which the SEC said would be distributed to harmed investors (SEC press release 2023-175).

September 2020 to February 2025, the class action. Tecku v. YieldStreet Inc., No. 1:20-cv-07327 (S.D.N.Y., Judge Victor Marrero), was filed in September 2020 by purchasers of BPDNs issued by YS AltNotes I in the Vessel Deconstruction I, Vessel Deconstruction Fund III and Louisiana Oil & Gas Fund offerings, alleging the platform sold “riskier-than-junk-bond” investments with inadequate disclosure. The court denied the motion to dismiss on May 3, 2022 (CourtListener) and the case proceeded. The parties settled for a $6.2M cash fund plus up to $2.75M of forgiven fees, a nominal $9M; the court gave final approval and entered judgment on February 21, 2025, awarding class counsel $2,066,666.67 in fees and $196,529.19 in expenses from the fund (Justia, Document 167; Law360).

April 2020 to September 2025, the marine recovery. Yieldstreet sued the Lakhani borrower group and pursued assets in four countries. It settled in August 2025 for $5M, applied the whole sum to its own legal and enforcement costs, and told investors to expect losses on the full $89M (CNBC, September 5, 2025). The fund documents permitted that; the investor letters did not anticipate it.

August to December 2025, CNBC. Three reports (August 18, September 5, December 5) documenting $78M, $89M and $41M of losses, the 4-in-30 total-loss and 23-in-30 watchlist rates on real estate, and the removed performance chart.

May 2025, the CEO change. Weisz out, Caplan in, no reason given.

June to July 2025, the insider round. $45M then $77M, led by Tarsadia.

October to December 2025, the rebrand. Announced October 22, 2025 (“Yieldstreet is becoming Willow Wealth”, company blog); the company’s follow-up post dates the name change to November 2025; CNBC reported the rebrand and the removed chart on December 5, 2025. The record is: announced October 22, changed in November, reported by CNBC in December. The adviser became Willow Asset Management LLC and the broker-dealer Willow Wealth Markets LLC in the same window.

March to August 2026, the fund sale. Suspension March 18, agreement March 19, vote July 31, close August 25, 2026.

FINRA arbitration. Plaintiff firms including Stoltmann Law, Eccleston Law and Investorclaims were publicly soliciting Yieldstreet and Willow claims through 2025 and 2026. The Real Estate Crowdfunding Review reported no public FINRA award against the firm as of June 2026; we found none either. The Form CRS for Willow Wealth Markets states the broker-dealer has no disciplinary history, which is accurate for that entity; the 2023 SEC order names the parent and the adviser.

Complaint patterns

Unverified customer reports, with sample sizes: the Better Business Bureau profile, filed under Yieldstreet Inc. and retitled Willow Wealth, is not BBB-accredited and shows five complaints marked unresolved and three unanswered as of September 2026 (BBB profile, via search summaries); review sites in 2026 report a C- grade and about 22 complaints in the trailing three years, which we could not confirm on the BBB page itself. Themes are money sitting uninvested in the wallet with refund requests refused, real estate positions moved to the watchlist, and slow or absent communication. Trustpilot shows 1.6 out of 5 from 43 reviews as of July 15, 2026, with the recurring accusation that the rebrand is an attempt to escape the Yieldstreet record. Bogleheads, Reddit and Early-Retirement.org threads from 2023 to 2026 describe deals selling out in minutes, late K-1s and watchlisted deals with no timeline. None of this is evidence of wrongdoing; together it describes a customer base that has stopped trusting the platform’s communication.

This section is two lists, and the first one is short.

Who it might still suit

• Existing investors with open positions. You cannot move them; read every investor letter, keep the K-1s, note the date each deal is watchlisted, and claim losses when the vehicle dissolves. Do not add new money to average down; the manager’s incentive to resolve your old deal is unchanged by your new one.
• Former Alternative Income Fund holders, who since August 25, 2026 own SOFIX Class I shares managed by Mount Logan. That position is a different fund with a different adviser and quarterly liquidity; judge it on Mount Logan’s record, not Willow’s.
• Accredited investors who specifically want the Carlyle, StepStone or Goldman evergreen funds at a $10,000 minimum and cannot get them through an adviser. Willow is a distribution channel; the fund is the counterparty. Compare the share class and fees Willow offers against a direct subscription.

Who should skip it

• Anyone opening a first account for the direct deals. The structure that produced the 2019 and 2021 losses is intact, and the data that would let you judge whether underwriting has improved is no longer published.
• Non-accredited investors. The product built for you was sold; what remains at $10,000 is third-party funds you can reach elsewhere, and a managed account at $25,000 that charges 1.25% to allocate you into the platform’s own products.
• Anyone who might need the money inside five years. No secondary market, watchlists with no end date, and a manager whose cost recovery ranks ahead of you.
• IRA investors considering levered real estate SPVs, for the UBTI reason above and the loss-timing reason above.

This section puts the assigned competitors and a liquid alternative on one table, then says which reader goes where.

Table: Willow Wealth against its closest alternatives, as of September 2026

Which reader goes where. If what you wanted from Yieldstreet was short-duration private credit with a visible default table, Percent publishes one, charges on interest rather than on capital, and starts at $500; its 11.8% corporate-loan default rate is the number to read before the 17% coupon. If you wanted private real estate without accreditation, Fundrise is cheaper by a factor of two or three and has audited eREIT financials, though its October 2025 redemption suspension shows the interval-style exit is a promise, not a guarantee. If you wanted art, Masterworks had sold 29 of 500-plus works by June 2026, so its IRR has the same survivorship problem. If you wanted institutional commercial real estate the way Cadre sold it, EquityMultiple is the closest live analogue, with self-reported returns to discount. If you wanted an 8% to 9% private credit income stream with quarterly liquidity, CCLFX at 1% with no incentive fee, or BCRED through an adviser, is the institutional version of the Alternative Income Fund, with the 2026 gates as the honest price of that liquidity. And if you cannot say why you need any of them, the Treasury ladder in the last row beat the Alternative Income Fund’s 3.04% and the real estate book’s negative 2% with no K-1.

This section gives the sequence and the six documents to read before wiring.

The sequence, if you still intend to proceed:

1. Create the account at willowwealth.com.
2. Complete identity verification and, for most offerings, the accredited-investor attestation; 506(c) offerings ask for a CPA letter, tax returns or a brokerage statement.
3. Link a bank account. Funds sit in a Willow “wallet” before they move to an offering; the BBB complaints about money “in limbo” concern this step, so do not fund the wallet until you have picked an open offering.
4. Read the offering documents (below), then commit; investors report popular deals closing within hours.
5. Sign the subscription agreement electronically.
6. Watch for the first distribution date, the first K-1 the following spring, and any change of the deal’s status to “watchlist”.

The six things to read before wiring money:

1. The offering’s private placement memorandum or prospectus, specifically the fee table and the “use of proceeds” paragraph: the management fee and its basis, any access fee, the originator fee and the expense fee. For a third-party fund, the share class and its servicing fee.
2. The structure line. SPV or BPDN. If BPDN, read who the note issuer is and what its assets are; you are its creditor.
3. The manager’s cost-recovery and indemnification clauses. These are what let Willow keep the $5M marine settlement. Look for the words “expenses of the Fund”, “enforcement” and “prior to any distribution”.
4. The Form ADV Part 2A of Willow Asset Management (CRD 282487 at adviserinfo.sec.gov), Items 5, 10 and 11, where the adviser must describe how it is paid by the vehicles it recommends.
5. The SEC order of September 12, 2023 (Release 33-11230), which describes how the firm handled negative information about a borrower while selling a new deal on that borrower.
6. CNBC’s three 2025 reports and, if you held the Alternative Income Fund, the Form N-CSR for fiscal 2025 and the Form 425 of March 19, 2026 on EDGAR (CIK 1762229), the only audited, platform-run numbers that exist.

If Willow republishes a platform-wide track record, add it as a seventh and read it with the survivorship questions above.

Willow Wealth asks a new investor to trust three things: its underwriting, its disclosure and its fees. The record on all three is public and dated. The underwriting produced an $89M marine book secured on ships it could not find and a 2021 to 2022 real estate book with 4 total losses and 23 watchlists out of 30 sampled deals. The disclosure drew a settled SEC order in 2023 and, at the rebrand in late 2025, the removal of the only platform-wide performance data the company had ever published. The fees are charged on capital invested, collected ahead of you out of cashflow, and, as the marine settlement showed, the manager’s cost recovery ranks ahead of your principal in a workout. A new name changes none of it, and the company’s own explanation for the name (that it “had outgrown” a yield-focused product) is not a claim that the process changed.

We rate it 1.5 out of 5 rather than 1 because the entity is real, registered and solvent as of September 17, 2026; because its third-party fund shelf gives accredited investors a $10,000 route into Carlyle, StepStone and Goldman vehicles whose risk is those managers’ and not Willow’s; and because former Alternative Income Fund holders got a clean NAV-for-NAV exit into a fund run by someone else. We do not rate it higher because there is no reason to buy a Willow-underwritten deal from Willow today that did not also exist in 2021, and the reader who did so in 2021 has lost money.

The rating would change if three things happened. First, the company republishes a platform-wide track record by vintage and asset class that includes active, watchlisted and defaulted deals, dollar-weighted, with the methodology on the page; a platform-wide realised net IRR above 6% on that basis, sustained across two annual updates, would move us to 2.5. Second, the fee model moves from a percentage of invested capital to a percentage of value or a share of realised profit, so that the manager loses when you lose. Third, an outside investor leads a priced round, which would tell us what the market thinks the business is worth.

What to watch, with dates. The next Form ADV annual amendment for Willow Asset Management, due within 90 days of its fiscal year-end (so by about March 31, 2027), for regulatory assets under management and any new disciplinary disclosure. The resolution letters on the 23 watchlisted real estate deals, which will arrive without a schedule. The SOFIX quarterly repurchase results (Form N-23C-3 filings) for the first two quarters after the August 25, 2026 close, which will show whether former AIF holders are heading for the exit and being prorated. BrokerCheck for Willow Wealth Markets LLC (firm 172295) and the FINRA awards database for the first customer award. And the Short Term Note series numbers: if new series stop appearing, the deal warehouse has stopped turning over, the earliest public signal that the business is contracting.

Nothing here is investment advice; it is a description of a platform’s documents, its filings and its record as of the date stated, for a reader deciding whether to open an account.