How AI is Assisting Advisors in Providing Estate Planning InsightsHow AI is Assisting Advisors in Providing Estate Planning Insights
Estate planning isn’t just for the ultra-wealthy.
Estate planning is one of the most overlooked aspects of financial planning, yet it’s one of the most important.
Three-quarters of Americans have no estate plan;
Ninety-one percent of investors want estate planning services from their advisor, but only 22% receive them; and
Nearly half of financial advisors don’t offer estate planning services, even though 98% agree they should encourage clients to create plans.
These gaps represent a missed opportunity to serve clients comprehensively and build stronger, more meaningful relationships with them and their heirs.
Why Estate Planning Matters
The absence of an estate plan can result in avoidable fees, prolonged legal disputes and assets being distributed contrary to a client’s wishes. Yet many advisors shy away from offering estate planning because they feel it is time-consuming and requires specific areas of knowledge to do effectively.
Research from eMoney reveals that only 38% of advisors feel comfortable discussing estate and legacy planning with their clients. This reluctance underscores the pressing need for advisors to bridge this gap—and the good news is that technology makes it easier than ever.
Technology to Simplify the Process
AI-powered tools are transforming how advisors approach this essential service. With these tools, advisors can:
Save time by uploading client estate documents like wills, trusts, healthcare directives, and insurance policies.
Generate actionable summaries and insights from those documents using an AI engine that extracts key details and gives the advisor an executive summary of the client's estate, tax, and insurance scenarios.
Model and Communicate Strategies with visually engaging deliverables that clients can easily understand.
Advisor Success Stories
Empowering Multi-Generational Clients
For example, Lazetta Rainey Braxton, CEO of Real Wealth Coterie, uses an AI-powered advanced planning tool to simplify estate planning for her clients, many of whom are multi-generational families. Lazetta uses the tool to help clients clarify their goals and empower them as leaders of their financial plans. She uses the tool with clients while collaborating with estate planning attorneys. She believes that working with an attorney, not as a replacement for them, is a great model to follow.
Unlocking Opportunities with the “Sandwich” Generation
Craig Breitsprecher, founder of ThrivePoint Financial, uses estate planning tools to assist him as he works with clients balancing care for aging parents and dependent children. He uses the tool’s deliverables to initiate meaningful estate planning conversations that foster trust and provide immense value.
Additionally, it acts as a revenue driver. In one case, he used the tool to model strategies for a high-value client comparing advisors, which led to that client consolidating all assets with his firm.
Why Estate Planning tools Enhance your Business
One of the most impressive features of AI-powered estate tools is its ability to condense hundreds of pages of legal documents into a digestible snapshot for the client. These tools act as bridges, enhancing communication between clients and their estate attorneys.
It also helps to facilitate Multi-Generational Conversations. Estate planning becomes a natural way to engage the next generation of clients, deepening family relationships and trust.
I have seen this at my own practice. For example, one client, we will call her Stephanie J, who has a net worth of about $25 million (including an apartment building she owns), wanted to figure out the best way to leave assets equally to her three adult children, who each have different financial circumstances.
Determining how to split the assets fairly is the tricky part because inherited IRAs are taxable, so when high-income children inherit these accounts, the distributions may be taxed at a high rate. Additionally, one of the children is much more involved with managing the apartment building than the others, which makes this asset tricky to split evenly. In addition, most of the assets are in Stephanie’s name (very little in her husband’s name), which makes New York state estate tax planning more difficult because the exemption is not portable in New York.
By utilizing the FP Alpha Estate Planning Module and Snapshot, we could surface all of this information during a meeting. It helped us understand the complexity and engage with her estate planning attorney to make the recommendation.
Ultimately, we ended up setting up a marital trust to maximize her husband’s New York exemption, which should eventually result in less estate taxes owed by their children.
Democratizing Estate Planning
Estate planning isn’t just for the ultra-wealthy. It’s a critical service for anyone with assets to protect and distribute according to their wishes. Tools like FP Alpha and others empower advisors to deliver this value efficiently and confidently.
With AI-powered tools, offering estate planning insights is no longer daunting and time-consuming. Instead, it’s a streamlined service that strengthens relationships, builds trust, and helps advisors meet their clients’ needs—faster and more effectively than ever.
