Documents Are Only Half The Story
Meet estate planner Jude Smith.
For over 20 years, he has practiced in a major West Coast city. He typically drafts and implements five to ten estate plans per month. His office consists of five attorneys along with five support staff. He provides clients with “funding letters” that direct them to change ownership and beneficiary designations to be in accordance with their plans.
Jude never checked if clients completed this process. He viewed such work as belonging to the client or other advisors. He often thought about this hole in his estate plan implementation, but he viewed such services as too hard to provide. Without a platform to accomplish it, he convinced himself not to care because he would later profit from an unorganized client’s estate.
Recently, his client Bob passed away. Bob implemented a living trust estate plan five years ago. In his marketing pieces, Jude promoted that living trust planning would avoid probate and allow for the efficient administration of the client’s estate plan. At the time of this death, Bob’s financial affairs were a disorganized mess. His daughter, Carrie, walked into his office extremely upset. She had recently worked with her own estate planning attorney that was part of the Inheralink® community.
Carrie knew there was a better way.
Her shoebox was full of papers that needed to be organized. Jude wanted none of it, so he put the shoebox on his paralegal’s desk. The paralegal also wanted none of the mess and almost walked out.
After calming down, both Jude and the paralegal went through the shoebox and discovered the estate needed to be probated. What made matters worse, Carrie was named personal representative of the probate estate. Her anxiety and discomfort rose to another level.
Jude did not want to go through that experience again. He committed to creating best-in-class estate plans using the Inheralink® platform.
Challenges:
Creating organized estate plans
Linking assets and beneficiary designations in accordance with the estate plan
Avoiding client messes
Inheralink® Opportunity:
Inheralink® provided Jude with a state-of-the-art digital client portal. This enhanced his client services during the planning, implementation, lifetime maintenance, and after death administration of estate plans.
Joining the Inheralink® community allowed Jude to:
Perfect the organization of personal and financial client information
Learn client goals and objectives while also offering solutions
Review and implement the estate planning documents
Continue implementation oversight to verify assets and beneficiary designations are linked in accordance with the plan
Results:
Jude now knows documents are only half the story.
He fully integrated Inheralink® into his estate planning process. He and his clients no longer accept an estate plan that only focuses on the planning documents.
Additionally, Jude adjusted his implementation fees:
$1,500.00 if a client is unorganized and not committed to the process
$750.00 if a client is organized but not committed
No additional fee if the client is both super organized and fully committed
He estimated that by using Inheralink®, he had the opportunity to increase his estate planning implementation fees by $90,000 - $360,000 annually.
Most of all, Jude is now committed to creating estate plans that work.