Over the years, I’ve been introduced to a number of software applications that claim to help clients organize their affairs in the event of a death or serious illness. The idea is to take all of the relevant information and store it in the software, so that in the event of your death, your executor can have all the information necessary to administer your estate at his or her fingertips. If you become seriously ill, your representative can manage your affairs with a minimum of disruption.

Without naming names, the applications I’ve seen in the past suffered from one common malady: They looked like they were designed by estate planning attorneys, because a few of them were. With all due respect to the profession, many of the estate attorneys I’ve dealt with over the years have not exactly been technological whiz kids, and the documents they produce have not been user-friendly. So it was not surprising that the software produced by these individuals never caught on with advisors, nor with the public at large. Thankfully, Everplans, the subject of this review, appears to be cut from a different cloth. It started out as a consumer-facing application, so simplicity and usability were points of focus from the outset, and it is run by a CEO who has a real passion and personal attachment to the product.

Abby Schneiderman is a thirtysomething entrepreneur who started thinking about Everplans when she was preparing for her wedding. What would happen if she or her husband died or were incapacitated? Where would all the relevant documents and information be? In a crisis, it would need to be readily accessible and well organized. Did such a product or service exist? Apparently, there was nothing available to Schneiderman’s liking, so she decided to create one of her own in partnership with new media entrepreneur Adam Seifer.

Unfortunately, Schneiderman and her family needed something like Everplans sooner than she expected. As she was building out the site, her brother died in a car crash. It was then she became further convinced about the need for Everplans while dealing with the logistical issues of a close family member’s death and the settling of his estate. She is now a true evangelist for digital estate planning, and she firmly believes that Everplans is the best product to get the job done.

Getting Started With Everplans
One of the really nice aspects of Everplans is the guided navigation, which makes it very easy for a novice to get started. When you log on, you are taken to the “My To-Dos” page. It is essentially a checklist of all the things you should eventually enter into Everplans. It is divided into the following six sections: My Life, Health & Medical, Financial, Legal, Eldercare and “After I’m Gone.” Each section includes a number of subsections. For example, for Health & Medical there are doctors, advance directives, health info and health insurance. For Legal, there are attorneys, wills, powers of attorney and trusts. Ideally, a user will be motivated enough to complete all of the information as soon as possible, but some users may look at the potential list of to-dos and be overwhelmed. For those users, there’s a prominent box on the To-Do page labeled “Create a Custom To-Do List.” This instructs the user to answer a few quick questions, and the application will generate a custom to-do list that “helps you tackle your most critical life-planning issues.”

Based on your answers, the application customizes the checklist and fills it out, as appropriate. For example, the first question you are asked is, “Why are you visiting the site?” The drop-down list provides a wide selection of answers, including “I want to get organized,” and “My financial planner asked me to visit.” I checked the latter box and I was asked for some basic demographic information, as well as some very basic insurance and estate planning information. In a matter of minutes, my custom to-do list was generated. As you complete the information for a specific item, either a blue or an orange check mark appears. Blue signifies “done.” Orange signifies, “In my Everplan.”

So, for example, when I said I had a spouse and children, that information was added automatically and was now “In my Everplan” under “My Family.” I can add more information by clicking on the links to add the names of my spouse and children if desired, as well as status, addresses, phone numbers, e-mail addresses, photos, documents and notes. For the kids, there are additional fields for the names of schools or day cares (if applicable), health and medical information and dietary information.

During the wizard session, I was also asked if I had health insurance and disability insurance. Since I answered both questions in the affirmative, those to-do items were checked in blue as they were done, but I still needed to click the link associated with those items to add my policy information. In each case, the application allowed me to provide sufficient detail. For health, I was asked which type of policy I had (private-employer, private-individual, Medicare, Medicaid, etc.). Depending on the selection, additional fields appeared (the carrier name, the ID, the prescription ID, the location of the insurance card and key documents, etc.). You also have the option to scan policies and insurance cards so they are available through your Everplan. Besides the primary health insurance carrier, there is an option to add supplemental health insurance carriers.

I can’t cover all the types of information that can be entered in the space allotted, but I will mention some of the highlights. Under “My Life,” beyond the normal demographic information that you’d expect, there are subsections for emergency contacts, vehicles and pets. In the last subsection, you can give the pet’s age, health or dietary needs, notes and instructions for a pet guardian and a pet insurance policy if there is one. You can also upload and file any pet-related documents. (Surprisingly, there was no field to list the veterinarian.)

Perhaps the most important and often overlooked portion of this section is labeled “Digital World.” This is where a user can provide often-overlooked but necessary digital information to a trusted party, including passwords (Are they stored in a password manager, in a computer file or elsewhere, and how are they accessed?) e-mail accounts, devices (make sure your family or agent knows how to unlock your phones, tablets, laptops, etc.), social media accounts, shopping/e-commerce accounts, payment/e-commerce accounts (such as Google Wallet or PayPal), video streaming, music, cloud storage, blogging, gaming, software, web hosting, messaging/VoIP, travel information (such as frequent-flyer programs, hotel programs, TripAdvisor, TripIt, etc.), ticketing (on sites such as Ticketmaster and Fandango) and other items.

Under the Health & Medical section, the Advance Directive subsection is smart enough to know that I live in Florida. If I don’t have the necessary documents, it prompts me to download a package that includes a Florida “Designation of Health Care Surrogate” form. Clearly, most advisors will want their clients to have documents customized to their needs by an estate planning attorney; however, the information provided can be a good starting point for future discussions. It would be nice if advisors had the option to provide their own custom sample documents or instead had the option for the client to “click here to schedule an appointment to create your own custom documents.”

“Financial Accounts and Assets” allows for the addition of all typical asset accounts, credit cards, tax returns, safe deposit boxes and loans. Currently, all of this data must be added manually, but my understanding is that Everplans will be adding account aggregation so that all financial accounts can be added and updated automatically. No further information on account aggregation is available at this time.

“After I’m Gone” is also fairly comprehensive. It allows users to write their own obituaries, designate the types of funeral services they want (if any) and designate where they’d like the services held. You can even specify funeral-related events or wishes (e.g., “I’d like to have a viewing before my funeral,” “I’d like to observe my religion’s mourning events,” etc.). You can name who you’d like to officiate at your funeral, who the pallbearers are, who should deliver eulogies, readings, prayers, music, people to attend and donations.

Once you enter meaningful information in Everplans, you can name deputies whom you wish to grant access to some, or all, of your information. For example, you might grant your spouse access to everything in your Everplan, but if one of your children is going to make health-care decisions, the child can be given access to all relevant health and medical information. Your executor might need total access, but your financial advisor might need only access to financial sections and estate-related material. The main takeaway here is that the owner of the account has full control over who sees what, and that access can be changed by the owner at any time.

Initial Impressions
My initial impression of Everplans is highly favorable. It is easy to use, easy to navigate and easy to understand. For each subsection, there is a related “Learn” page. Generally speaking, when you go to a new subsection for the first time, you initially land on the Learn page. The page explains what the subsection is about, why it’s important to share it, and any other relevant information.

For advisor clients, virtually any page you land on has the advisors’ virtual business cards with their pictures, names, company names and links you can use to call them or send them e-mail. There is also a “chat now” button in the lower right of the screen wherever you navigate within the application. This currently links to a dedicated Everplans employee, but it could, and probably should, link to the advisory firm if the user opts for that.

In addition to the to-do list, the site contains a wealth of other useful information on other topics such as powers of attorney, important documents, elder care, trusts, do not resuscitate (DNR) orders, life insurance and wills. For each topic, there’s a quick-start “cheat sheet” as well as a “what you need to know” section that does a much deeper dive into the topic. Where appropriate, there are links to specific, state-by-state resources. These cover everything from how to order death certificates, digital estate planning laws (if any), organ donation registries, death with dignity legislation (if any) and probate laws.
Security on the site is state of the art. Everplans uses bank level AES-256 bit encryption, 2048-bit SSL certificates and other technologies to keep client data secure.

There are no real problems with the site that I uncovered initially, but there are some additional features that would make it more valuable to advisors. The first, mentioned earlier, is account aggregation. Just adding all the financial information to the site can take considerable effort; if Everplans can automate part of the data collection, it would be a major plus. Second, the firm really needs to integrate with other industry software. As a stand-alone product, Everplans has value, but it would be infinitely more valuable if client information that already exists in other advisor systems could be used to populate the Everplans software. Even better, advisors ought to be able to use Everplans data to populate their own software products. For example, if prospects could enter their data into an Everplan, they could then deputize their advisors to take all relevant information for other CRM or financial planning software, etc. In this scenario, Everplans also serves as the advisor’s digital data gathering form. For the software to be effective in that regard, some information it does not currently collect would need to be added, but that should be a relatively simple task.

It would also be helpful if advisors could share documents and other data between the Everplans system and client vaults in other applications. For example, if an advisor generated a financial plan for the client, a copy could be routed to the vault the advisor provides and another copy could go to Everplans, so that the designated deputies could access it if the client grants permission.

Overall, I’d like to see more differentiation between the consumer site and the advisor version. Right now, the difference is primarily the advisor’s ability to brand the dashboard and pricing. Consumers who sign up for Everplans on the retail website are given access to a limited version of the planning tool for free; in order to access the Premium plan (what advisor clients see) with full functionality, they must pay $75 per year—and consumers are left to complete the plan on their own, without a professional advisor’s help. On the advisor plan, the advisor will be able to log in and see the client’s progress via a dashboard. This professional view gives the advisor the ability to nudge the client toward completion. An advisor could end up paying as little as $12 per client per year. Advisors typically pay $2,500 a year for the first 200 client plans—but this price gets reduced with group discounts and institutional relationships.

Everplans is a promising new product that could be a boon for advisors and their clients, but in order to reach its full potential, it will need to add some functionality. This should not prove to be a challenge, so Everplans is definitely worth a look. Visit www.everplans.com to try it for yourself.