Kiplinger: Marguerita Cheng gives us “A Financial Planner’s Guide to 4 Tools That Help Advisers Take Estate Planning to the Next Level”
By Marguerita Cheng, CFP® Pro, CEO Blue Ocean Global Wealth
Financial advisers and wealth managers sit at this table, working with lawyers, tax accountants, trust officers, insurance specialists and real estate professionals, among others.
However, financial advisers can get more involved in estate plan preparation and analysis — providing more value to clients, forging a deeper relationship with them, and increasing revenue — with the help of modern estate planning tools.
These tools can help create estate plan documents (wills, trusts, powers of attorney, etc.), centralize financial documents, analyze existing estate plans, provide personalized insights, automate repetitive tasks and integrate tax planning strategies.
There are so many of these tools on the market, financial advisers often struggle to choose the best one. In this article, I compare four pieces of estate planning software that I believe may offer particularly good value.
1. EncorEstate Plans: EncorEstate Plans combines estate document creation and trust funding in one platform and helps financial advisers integrate estate planning into client services. It’s best for clients who requires basic to complex estate planning.
Key features:
- Trust funding. EncorEstate Plans has a trust funding service that allows advisers to transfer ownership of assets into the trusts they create on behalf of their clients.
- Human review and trusted guidance. Every estate plan goes through a 60-point quality review by an estate planning professional. EncorEstate Plan’s back office also includes paralegals and attorneys who can provide trusted guidance.
- Flexible pricing. Advisers can pay for each plan or opt for a subscription-based model, if you have a larger clientele, for example.
- Custom documents. When required, advisers can create custom documents, such as restatements, QDOT language and Special Needs Trust provisions.