While watching the Major League Baseball playoffs this week, I noticed, among the usual advertisements for beer, trucks and life insurance, a notable outlier—online estate planning platform Trust & Will. I took this unexpected collision of my work and leisure as a sign that it was about time I wrote something about this provider’s advisor-focused offering—Trust & Will for Advisors.
Much has been written about the increasingly crowded estate planning tech space, with companies jostling for positions to help advisors incorporate estate planning into their practices. Trust & Will was one of the very first to enter this ring back in 2017.
“We started this movement.” says Andres Mazabel, general manager, advisors at Trust & Will.
The platform currently boasts over 13,000 advisors (actual users with a dashboard, not just access—the number with access is even higher due to a partnership with LPL, announced in April.)
As for the actual planning experience, Trust & Will is a bit more client-driven than some of its competitors, which may appeal to advisors who are either less comfortable with estate planning, worried about crossing the fine line into illegally practicing law or both. The client experience is similar at its core whether they go through their advisors or simply stumble upon the site themselves.
The two main a la carte offerings are, unsurprisingly, a trust ($499) and a will ($199). After selecting an option, Trust & Will walks the client through inputting the required information to create a basic trust or will. The advisor can monitor and receive notifications about each client’s progress on his personal dashboard and, on completion, receives an “estate report” that offers a visualization of the plan that can be used as a client deliverable as well as some insights from the Will & Trust team about that specific estate that can be used to continue the planning conversation.
For clients who are not comfortable with the process or have questions that the site doesn’t answer, Trust & Will also maintains a contracted network of outside attorneys in nearly every jurisdiction in the U.S. who, for a $300 additional fee, will connect with the client and help guide them through the process. These are practicing estate planning attorneys, and the fee creates an actual limited-scope engagement for 12 months. There’s no AI in sight here (whether that’s a feature or a bug is up to you).
There are two ways for advisors to onboard their clients onto Trust & Will:
- Sign up for a free advisor account and receive a personalized referral link to give to clients. The clients themselves pay for their plan (with a discount from using the link)
- RIAs can pay a flat fee for a license that allows them to offer complimentary plans to up to 100 clients.
Ultimately, the name of the game for Trust & Will is simplicity, both in terms of ease of use and the types of estates they’re looking to service.
“Our core market is the mass market and affluent, maxing out around $5 million,” says Mazabel.
Not that that stops them from reaching for the stars. In 2023, Trust & Will brought on Rams quarterback Matthew Stafford and his wife Kelly as brand ambassadors.
