Turning To Tech
With the right tech, you can offer advanced planning in-house without investing more time and energy. Depending on your needs, you can find whole or partial solutions to fit with your comfort level and availability.
Tools like Trucendent and Trust and Will help streamline the creation of estate planning documents. At the same time, financial planning suites like MoneyGuide Pro have created integrated estate planning solutions such as Wealth Studios to help bring legacy planning into the larger conversation.
At my firm, we use FP Alpha’s new Estate Planning Lab that automatically incorporates the latest legislation changes into its recommendations ensuring our advice is optimized. We simply upload client documents, such as wills, trusts and estate plans, and the tool identifies personalized planning points in minutes.
With a comprehensive advanced planning profile for each of your clients, you’ll be able to expand your services, highlight more planning opportunities and generate more revenue – without adding additional staff or requiring your team to learn anything new.
Software In Action
Just last year, my firm nearly lost a client, “Erica,” due to a few urgent issues that she thought we would be unable to address. She already had one foot out the door, but I asked Erica if I could create a proposal to show her how we could help her using FP Alpha.
I knew that Erica was looking into a competitor who is light on planning services, so I pulled out all the stops to show her why a holistic, advanced approach is critical in establishing long term financial health. I showed capital gain tax planning, a cash out refinance opportunity, the impact proposed legislation could have on her, as well as state estate tax exposure based on several properties she owned. These were just a few of the many things I was able to easily outline and explain for Erica utilizing the tools in our software.
Rather than “outgrowing” us, I’m proud to say Erica is still our client and the relationship has grown in size!
With the right tech supporting our team, we are able to make good on the promise put forth by the phrase “holistic planning” for every client—turning current clients into bigger clients while also increasing engagement with potential clients.
It’s 2022, and there’s no reason every advisor shouldn’t be able to provide customized advanced planning solutions, setting you up to retain all of your clients, no matter how complex their needs become.
It’s time to start carrying a bigger umbrella.
Andrew Altfest, CFP, is president of Altfest Personal Wealth Management and founder of FP Alpha.