Estate planning often lingers in the background—something your clients expect but you might avoid offering due to its complexities. Yet, neglecting it can erode trust and, eventually, their business. While investment management and retirement planning often take center stage at the start of a client relationship, estate planning emerges as the critical thread that ties all financial domains together. A truly holistic approach to financial planning demands that estate planning be seamlessly integrated into your clients’ journeys.
Close the Void
By neglecting estate planning, you create a void between your clients’ needs and the services they expect—leaving them feeling underserved. For example:
- A study by CEG Insights in 2023 showed that over 85% of the clients of financial advisors surveyed had an expectation that their financial advisor would offer estate planning services. These same clients indicated that only slightly more that 40% of them felt they were receiving this service in a way that fulfilled their needs.
- A 2021 survey by Spectrum Group showed that 93% of financial advisor clients expected to receive estate planning advice from their advisor, but only 22% of these clients felt that they were receiving advice in this area.
Gaps between your clients’ expectations and the services you provide put your advisor-client relationship at risk. Ignoring estate planning doesn’t just weaken that bond—it also cuts you off from building connections with the next generation and the key decision-makers your clients trust, like executors and trustees.
- According to CNBC, most studies suggest that 80% or more of heirs will look for a new financial advisor after inheriting their parents’ wealth. And in a different article from CNBC, up to 70% of widows leave their husbands’ advisors within months or years.
Why estate planning is important
While retirement, investment, and tax planning often take priority as your clients’ immediate concerns, estate planning stands apart as the long-term need that keeps the planning process alive—offering ongoing opportunities once those initial priorities are addressed.
Adequate life insurance, proper beneficiary designations on investment and retirement accounts, and clear plans for medical and financial management during incapacity are fundamental needs for clients—no matter their wealth or personal circumstances.
As clients age and their wealth grows, their focus naturally shifts from immediate goals to their legacy. They want to ensure their hard-earned wealth benefits their heirs, while protecting it, preserving it, and often controlling its use—all without disrupting family harmony.
This might include:
- Designating and preparing those who become the decision makers and power holders of wealth’s management for years to come.
- Protecting wealth from creditors and allowing access to wealth consistent with an heir’s financial maturity and readiness. A spouse
- Creating a financial safety net for an heir’s life with careful balance between the desire for independence with the comfort of access.
- Supporting life’s goals and milestones consistent with the desire to provide and the practical impact of distributions from a portfolio, for weddings, education, and business endeavors.
- Leaving a legacy for grandchildrenGrandchildren that preserves family values by incentivizing desirable behaviors and disincentivizing the undesirable ones.
- Supporting charitable causes in the local community or at-large.
Estate planning must evolve with life events, each milestone serving as a key moment to reassess and adapt. As life grows more complex, so does the planning. Key events include:
- A divorce
- A birth
- Death of a spouse
- Second marriage and second family
- Ownership of a business
Clients look to their advisor as their trusted expert in other areas of investing and financial planning, they assume this will be the case in estate planning as well, with the tools providing estate planning assistance at the right point and time.
How estate planning can enhance client relationships
Offering comprehensive estate planning can help to strengthen and enhance your relationship with your clients in a variety of ways.
- Part of a comprehensive service offering: You offer advice on all other areas of financial planning, estate planning is a way to help clients with this long-term financial planning priority. They should not be forced to seek other professionals’ advice to traverse the void.
- Integration with wealth management: Estate planning has a natural integration with the other services you offer. Investing, retirement planning, tax planning and other services help build wealth during the client’s lifetime. Comprehensive estate planning services help build the bridge for the client to know that their wealth will be distributed according to their wishes upon their death.
- Builds client loyalty: Helping clients plan for their estates is part of helping them plan for their financial future holistically, and that of their families and other beneficiaries. This service helps cement client loyalty.
- Helps strengthen client relationships: Estate planning can involve some sensitive topics such as family dynamics and potentially strained family relationships. It also focuses on the client’s goals for their wealth after they are gone. Clients who have the confidence to freely discuss sensitive issues like these with their advisor are likely to remain as loyal clients though the trust these conversations can build between the client and the advisor.
- Opportunities for intergenerational wealth management: In dealing with a client’s estate planning issues, an advisor will often have the opportunity to interact with the client’s children or other members of the family’s next generation. These interactions can help the advisor build trust with this next generation often resulting in these folks also becoming clients.
- Client peace of mind and satisfaction: Your clients will gain a level of comfort and peace of mind by knowing that their trusted advisor is there to help with their estate planning.
Offering comprehensive estate planning doesn’t mean you can’t collaborate with outside experts like estate tax attorneys. Partnering with specialists when in-house expertise is unavailable demonstrates your commitment to putting your clients’ best interests first.
As their advisor you understand your clients’ issues and concerns surrounding estate planning. You understand the family dynamics and other non-financial issues that may come into play. Working with an estate planning expert can help put the goals and desires of your client into an estate plan that works from a tax and legal perspective to align with their goals.
How estate planning software can help close the void
While advisors often have all of the basic information needed to help their clients formulate an estate plan, this information is often presented in a way that makes it difficult to assemble a comprehensive estate plan.
At Holistiplan we are developing an estate planning module that helps you unlock estate planning for more clients, more often. (by extending it beyond high-net-worth clients and family offices.) Our solution equips advisors with client-ready deliverables, actionable insights and tools that streamline estate plan understanding and management, revolutionizing how advisors scale their estate planning services.
Start by understanding your client’s unique situation and goals to establish the foundation for their estate plan. Next, model and visualize wealth distribution across key scenarios. Finally, pinpoint priorities and address execution gaps to ensure seamless planning.
We will explore more in our upcoming articles.
- An estate report that will help ensure that your client’s planning and their documents are consistent with their intended goals.
- An asset diagram that will help you and your client visualize who will be receiving which assets and the amounts in an easy to follow diagram.
- A beneficiary report that helps to ensure that all transfer on death assets are correctly assigned to the proper beneficiaries and up to date.
- These reports provide you with a clear understanding of your client’s estate planning needs and serve as a powerful tool to drive meaningful discussions. They reveal what your client’s current estate plan looks like and, more importantly, highlight areas where adjustments are needed to achieve their goals.
To learn more, please contact us at info@holistiplan.com.
