Estate Planning “Fee for Service” Models

According to Cerulli and Associates $84 Trillion dollars will be changing hands in the largest wealth transfer in history over the next 20 years. 

In light of this, thousands of forward looking advisors are leveraging Estate Planning technology that has made it easier than ever for advisors to offer services like facilitating new document creation, existing estate plan reviews, and easier than ever updates to out of date estate plans.   

This new estate planning technology is creating the perfect opportunity for firms to add a ‘fee for service’ option for estate planning services.  

“Adding estate planning services with EncorEstate Plans has been very impactful for our clients, but also to our business. In our first year of offering the service, we generated $200,000 of revenue from this line of business. It continues to generate six figures of revenue annually. There are two instances that I can remember where we were in competition with another firm, and we won the business because we also offered estate planning, which the competing firm did not.

It is great to have Encore Support as a resource to educate us about how to get plans done correctly. They have constantly been a resource to me and my team and have provided us with many a-ha moments along the way. By offering this service, we are obtaining slightly more referrals than we were before. Some of those referrals also need traditional advisory services, which remains the core of our business.

We feel that our AUM business is stickier because of the estate planning piece that we offer. A client's estate plan is another annual touchpoint that we can make to continue to deliver value.”

T. Kumar Advisor in CA

It is common for advisors that facilitate the client experience in establishing a new Trust or Will based estate plans to charge between $500-2000 as a one time ‘fee for service’.   This fee includes assistance in funding of Trust based plans by updating beneficiary designations and even real estate deed filing that some estate planning technology services make possible. 

Ongoing reviews of existing estate plans also fit well with subscription based ‘fee for service’ models that provide Visual Estate Plan Summaries and ongoing reviews of previous estate plan decisions that life events such as changes to health, wealth, and relationships may have altered in the past year.   The service of keeping estate plans up to date just like a financial plan is now within the reach of advisors to add to their financial planning offering. 

AdvicePay Trend Report Version - Services You Can Offer

We highly recommend you review the 2024 AdvicePay Fee for Service Industry Trend Report for information on how fees for service are growing in our industry as forward thinking financial planners add more services to their offering with the help of technology.  This report can be downloaded here:  https://info.advicepay.com/trends