Several websites are now available to assist and guide advisers and their clients through the process of legacy planning.
The newest,
EstateLogic, is already being used by 120 advisers. It allows clients to store important documents and personal information such as wills, birth certificates and the locations of safe-deposit boxes on a secure website that can be accessed at any time. The online repository also provides guidance on dozens of types of documents to cover every aspect of organizing, communicating and preserving the details of a client's estate, as well as any personal information they want to pass on.
Upon logging on to the site (accessible via executorsresource.com), users find a home page with tabs and icons for four categories: estate documents, financials, family legacy and personal instructions. There is also a helpful resource center, where most users should probably start. Within each section, users can upload relevant documents and find links to other document types or instructions.
Cost, which is based on storage used, ranges from $49 a year for 250 megabytes of storage to $129 a year for two gigabytes.
One tool for financial advisers is Estate-Logic's Executor Bootcamp PowerPoint presentation, which comes with a tutorial. Advisers can personalize the presentation for use with individual clients or for general use with prospects at legacy-planning seminars.
Greg Evans, a partner with the Millstone Evans Group of Raymond James & Associates Inc., has been test-driving the site for three months. He subscribed for his own account and also set one up for his mother as her executor.
“Settling an estate is a royal pain in the tush, and since I've been divorced for many years, I've asked my sister to serve as my executor,” he said. “Rather than having her come in cold, I can lay out this road map for her with everything pertinent to my estate on there.”
Mr. Evans added that he is about halfway through the process, having entered information about his credit cards, passwords, attorney contact information, tax returns, insurance documents and other information.
His firm, which manages $210 million in assets, also has four clients using the site. In addition, his group soon plans to subscribe to a co-branded version of the site and begin offering it to the rest of its top clients.
While there have been no complaints among his clients thus far, Mr. Evans suggested some areas for improvement.
“There are some things that aren't as intuitive as I'd like, and I've made some calls to them on that; I think they need to guide it a little bit more toward folks like my mom and my dad,” he said.
Mr. Evans is right. Simple adjustments such as increasing the site's rather small default font size and improving navigation I believe would improve the site markedly. Adding a button to take users back to the home page after navigating away from it also would be helpful.
Similarly, instructions tailored more for non-advisers for adding, describing and organizing assets would make the site easier for clients.
Taking an adviser-centric approach to legacy planning is
Plan Your Legacy, which puts the adviser center-stage and allows him or her to manage the entire process through a turnkey online software package called Breadcrumbs.
Adviser Mark Colgan, proprietor of Colgan Capital LLC and author of the “Survivor Assistance Handbook” (Eastside Financial Education, 2002), created the site (planyourlegacy.com) based on his own experience.
Mr. Colgan said he was motivated to write the book following the unexpected death of his first wife when she was just 28 years old.
“There was this big void of information on what to do,” he said. “I realized the value of traditional estate planning, but I knew through my own experiences that a lot of the more personal information was being lost or overlooked.”
The site and its tools, in turn, were inspired by a terminally ill reader of Mr. Colgan's book who contacted him seeking more proactive assistance in getting his affairs in order so things would be less hard on his wife.
“Legacy planning should be one of the top three services you provide as an adviser, and our software makes the adviser the nucleus of that process,” Mr. Colgan said, explaining that the software allows an adviser to take a client through the entire planning process, from finding an estate attorney to planning for funeral arrangements.
The site also provides training and adviser marketing tools, including brochures and other materials, as well as coaching, web conferencing and connectivity to what he said he hopes grows into a larger legacy-planning community among advisers.
A subscription to the software costs $250 a month.
Another site,
Private Matters, takes an approach to estate planning that is adviser-friendly but not adviser-centric.
Martin Hubbard, managing director of Vancouver, B.C.-based Private Matters, said the site (privatematters.com) has been running since 2004 and now has 4,000 subscribers. Its mission is to provide a private and secure space for users to share their final wishes, both of a practical and emotional nature.
“Lawyers necessarily write things in legalese and in the form of a cold, hard distribution of your assets,” Mr. Hubbard said.
“Our Choices and Wishes documents are meant to be far more touchy and feely,” he said. “You can notify people of all the stuff you need to do legally and where to find things, but it is also about the things you can't say while you are still alive.” Mr. Hubbard cited as an example a collection of medals his father was awarded following World War II that the former wants to ensure goes, eventually, to the right person.
An initial subscription to Private Matters costs $69.99, then $12 per year thereafter.
E-mail Davis Janowski at [email protected].
