In this article: Watch the Webinar Recording Addressing Procrastination in Estate Planning How To...
In this article:
- Watch the Webinar Recording
- Starting with Emotional Real Estate
- Visualizing Clients' Financial Lives with Asset Map
- Executing Clients' Wishes via Estate Planning with Encore
- Action Steps to Get Started Today
In today’s volatile markets, clients want deeper and more personal value. And financial advisors need to not only deliver more of that personal AND personalized value, but they need to keep looking for innovative ways to deliver unique and tangible value beyond portfolio management.
A recent Encore workshop featuring industry leaders Adam Holt (Asset-Map), Matt Morris (EncorEstate Plans), Eric Negron (Forefront Wealth Partners), and Blake Brewer (Legacy Letter) provided practical insights and strategic guidance on how advisors can meaningfully integrate estate planning and legacy building into their advisory practices.
These strategies will enhance client experiences and significantly deepen relationships with each of your clients. This recap of the workshop has been reformatted into a guide showing you Eric Negron's proven system for:
- Revealing Client Legacies: Guide clients through crafting emotional & financial legacy stories that forge unbreakable bonds.
- Differentiating Your Practice: Offer standout service leveraging Asset-Map, Legacy Letter, and EncorEstate Plans to further set you apart.
- Becoming THE Family Advisor: Scale your impact and your fees by positioning yourself as the go-to expert for every generation.
- Kickstarting Estate Planning Talks: Learn a simple conversation framework that gets clients excited, not overwhelmed.
Lastly, this expanded guide dives deeper into the detailed strategies discussed by each expert, offering comprehensive insights and actionable steps for financial advisors wanting to elevate their service offerings. Here are the key takeaways:
Watch the Webinar Recording
Starting with Emotional Real Estate
Estate planning is a core part of financial planning, but it goes beyond just "planning": it's the emotions and nuances of relationships all tied in with money. Eric Negron, CEO of Forefront Wealth, emphasized that advisors need to consider the deeper emotional aspects of their interactions with clients:
"We've got to move through the three forms of real estate: digital real estate, top-of-mind real estate, and the most expensive real estate, the heart."
Emotional real estate is the most valuable piece of "real estate" advisors can develop with their clients. At risk of stating the obvious, keeping clients' emotions and heart at the center of it all allows for deeper and more authentic relationships.
When it comes to estate planning, doing so allows advisors to ultimately shape and influence clients' behaviors and actions towards better, positive outcomes. Estate planning discussions thus become not just about legal documents and asset distribution but also about legacy, values, and emotional connections within families.
One way to prime the pump for estate planning conversations is by having clients write letters to their loved ones (called legacy letters, part of an initiative Blake Brewer started shortly after discovering his dad's letter to him). Legacy letters help clients articulate deeply personal messages and stories for their families, creating powerful emotional legacies that far surpass financial assets alone.
How Eric and Forefront Ground Estate Planning Discussions with Clients
- Begin discussions about estate planning by highlighting the emotional and relational aspects first, before transitioning into technical or financial considerations.
- Share relatable stories or examples to illustrate how effective estate planning positively impacts families.
- Regularly revisit the emotional goals and concerns your clients express to keep conversations meaningful and impactful.
- Integrate legacy letters into your advisory services as a unique offering to deepen client connections.
- Conduct workshops or small group sessions focused specifically on creating legacy letters, fostering deeper emotional engagement and community among your clients.
- Tee up legacy letters as starting points to discuss broader legacy and estate planning strategies.
Visualizing Clients' Financial Lives with Asset-Map
As clients share what matters most to them, whether it be assets of high sentimental value or their retirement accounts, figuring out a way to visualize and map out all of those assets hammers home all of the legacy preservation aspects of your conversations with them.
For Eric, visual tools such as Asset-Map simplify intricate financial information into digestible, visual formats. This simplicity empowers advisors to further dig in with even more meaningful conversations that are better attuned to the entire gamut of financial and estate planning opportunities in each client's life.
Asset-Map's CEO Adam Holt expands on this:
“When you're lost, what do you want? You want a map and you want directions. Asset-Map provides clarity on who matters, what's important, and how best to organize financial intentions.”
Revisiting the real estate analogy, after Eric and his clients determine the proverbial lay of the land (e.g., who and what are most important to them, intaking their list of assets), Eric and the Forefront team will then map out clients' wishes, beneficiaries, and assets via Asset-Map.
How Eric and Forefront Map Out Clients' Wishes and Assets
- Use visual mapping during client meetings to foster clearer communication and understanding.
- Regularly update visual maps to reflect changing life circumstances or financial goals.
- Train staff members on effective presentation techniques using visual tools, ensuring consistent, clear client experiences.
Related: How to Increase Your Client Estate Plan Completion Rate
Executing Clients' Wishes via Estate Planning with Encore
After mapping out everyone and everything in their lives that matter most to them, it's time to execute on clients' wishes by facilitating the creation of their estate plan.
The traditional way of doing so was by referring clients to a trusted estate attorney. But, clients and advisors often found themselves back at Square 1 after months of procrastination: no estate plan completed, let alone started.
EncorEstate Plans's CEO Matt Morris expands on this:
“When advisors say, ‘Go see an attorney,’ they're effectively sending clients to discuss their end-of-life decisions and family dynamics with strangers.”
Advisors (like Eric and Forefront) who have realized that the only way to end this procrastination and overcome client behavior is to sit even further in the driver's seat for all aspects of their clients' financial lives. That's why advisors like Eric have turned to estate planning software like EncorEstate Plans.
Encore helps advisors solve for the estate planning procrastination problem by empowering advisors to directly facilitate the estate planning process, substantially reducing the emotional and logistical barriers clients typically encounter.
How Eric and Forefront Execute Clients' Wishes and Assets
- Leverage Encore to streamline document preparation, execution, and review processes.
- Offer guided estate planning sessions directly through your practice, positioning yourself as a facilitator rather than merely a referrer.
- Educate clients about common estate planning pitfalls, emphasizing your role in preventing these issues and ensuring that clients' families are taken care of after they pass away.
Related: How to Start Your Estate Planning Practice as a Financial Advisor
Action Steps for Advisors to Get Started Today
Here's the action plan for integrating all of this into your firm's processes:
1. Attract New Prospects via Community Engagement
In a brief aside, Eric explained how he funnels new prospects to his firm by posting and sharing knowledge on his local community Facebook groups. He recommends positioning yourself as an accessible expert in estate planning and legacy discussions, especially when prospects ask for estate attorney referrals, which will then lead to prospects taking note of him and Forefront's services.
2. Further Nurture Prospects with Legacy Letter Workshops
Regularly organize events around legacy letter creation, encouraging emotional sharing and stronger relationships with you while driving more referrals.
3. Conduct Beneficiary and Trustee Audits as Both a Prospecting and Customer Retention Tool
Schedule systematic beneficiary and estate planning document reviews using tools like Asset-Map to ensure client data is accurate and current.
4. Execute Your Clients' Legacy Wishes with Estate Document Creation and Deed Filing Software
Use estate planning software like EncorEstate Plans to facilitate both the completion of living trusts and wills AND funding of trusts via Encore's deed filing service.
5. Invest in Continuous Education for You and Your Team
Invest in ongoing education for your team, focusing on emotional intelligence, legacy building, and the latest estate planning tools to continually enhance your advisory capabilities.
Advisors can significantly differentiate themselves by integrating emotional intelligence, clear visual communication, streamlined estate planning processes, and deeply meaningful legacy-building activities. Leveraging Asset-Map, Encore Estate Plans, and Legacy Letters provides advisors not just a competitive edge but also the opportunity to genuinely transform client relationships, elevating their practice to a more emotionally and financially impactful level.
You can learn more about Asset-Map and get a deep-dive demo of the Encore platform:
