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Meet estate planner Carol Johnson.
Her practice is located in the Midwest. She implements three to five estate plans per month. Carol’s firm includes herself, an associate attorney, and three support staff.
Her estate planning services consist of preparing documents for clients and probating a client’s estate at the time of death. She usually meets the client once to create the plan, sends out drafts of documents, and meets the client again to execute the documents.
After that meeting, she typically never sees or hears from them again. With no lifetime client relationships, she is tired of always wondering if there will be sufficient new clients to support her overhead.
With great uncertainty in the laws, client goals and objectives change all the time. The list of assets also evolves. Carol wanted to enhance her services by offering estate planning annual meetings to provide peace of mind for the client as well as create lifetime relationships. She knew this service would increase her fees.
However, she was hesitant to add the annual meeting services because she knew it would add extra work to her staff. Without a platform to provide a foundation for these meetings, each client’s files would be organized differently by each staff member. In the end, she did not want to create a service that her practice could not support.
Carol recently heard about Inheralink®. She was excited to go from one time fees to recurring fees, create lifetime relationships with annual meetings, and have a platform that makes it easy to support the service.
Challenges:
Lack of recurring fees
Lack of lifetime relationships with clients
Lack of a platform to easily support annual meetings
Inheralink® Opportunity:
Carol implemented Inheralink® into her practice. She not only used it to support her annual meeting service, but also adopted the platform as part of her planning and implementation process.
To get started, she sent letters to all her existing clients offering annual meetings and began to recommend the service at the end of each estate planning document execution meeting.
To her surprise, over 25% of her existing clients signed up for annual meetings.
Inheralink® supported Carol by providing a client portal that:
Updates the list of assets, value of assets, and beneficiary designations
Provides a record of ownership and beneficiaries changes
Tracks client gifts and completions for estate tax purposes
Allows clients to update their personal and family information
Provides a digital document vault to store a client’s estate plan and other important legal documents
Allows clients to update a special emergency folder in the digital vault that stores advanced planning directors, emergency contact information, and medical history that is easily accessed by health care providers or loved ones
Updates the client’s designation of personal property
Updates the location of other important documents like birth certificates, marriage certificates, and original car titles
Tracks changes to client’s information when the estate planner, client, or other advisors update personal and financial information or adds documents
Provides a private communication system allowing clients to direct the estate planner on desired changes
Results:
Carol decided to charge a minimum flat fee of $750.00 per annual meeting up to a maximum of $2,500.00.
Within three years of implementing this service, Carol’s recurring fees rose from zero to over $100,000, with approximately 100 clients visits annually. The cost of Inheralink® is minimal compared to the potential increase in fees.