Everybody dies. Not everybody plans for it, though.
That's where financial advisers come in. Few professionals are as well positioned to offer guidance on this sensitive topic — or to steer clients to specialists such as estate planners or attorneys. Indeed, financial advisers, who meet with clients on a regular basis, sometimes for years, can play a pivotal role in getting them to get their affairs in order long before they face their own mortality.
Fortunately, there's no shortage of online tools and resources available to advisers who want to assist their clients with end-of-life planning.
What follows is a list of resources that can help advisers assist clients with legacy planning. Most of the offerings don't require a lot of extra work for advisers. Instead, many of the tools enable them to guide clients through a DYI process — offering a helping hand when needed.
EstateLogic 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 site, owned by Executor's Resource Inc., has been around for about a year. But it already boasts a user list of more than 120 advisers.
The cost of the service, which is based on storage used, ranges from $49 a year for 250 megabytes of storage to $129 a year for two gigabytes. The site offers a 30-day free trial that requires no credit card.
One notable feature: Estate-Logic's developers have created what they call the Executor Bootcamp, which is a PowerPoint presentation and tutorial for financial advisers. The idea is for advisers to personalize the presentation for use with individual clients, or in holding legacy-planning seminars with groups of clients or prospects.
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 legacies and personal instructions. There is also a resource center, which is where most users should probably start. Within each section, users can upload relevant documents and find links to other document types or instructions.
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 himself and also as executor for his mother.
“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,” he said. “I think they need to guide it a little bit more toward folks like my mom and my dad.”
Mr. Evans is right. Simple adjustments such as increasing the site's rather small default font size and improving navigation 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.
For more information on Estate Logic visit
Executor's Resource.
Plan Your Legacy represents more of a legacy-planning practice management curriculum than a website tool.
It puts the adviser center stage as the guide leading clients through the process of legacy planning. The adviser manages the entire process through a turnkey online software package called Breadcrumbs.
A subscription to the software costs $250 a month.
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.
“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. The reader contacted the adviser seeking more proactive assistance in getting his affairs in order so things would be less difficult 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 making funeral arrangements.
The site also provides training and adviser marketing tools, including brochures and other materials. In addition, it offers coaching and web conferencing, as well as connectivity to what Mr. Colgan hopes will grow into a larger legacy-planning community among advisers.
For more information visit
Plan Your Legacy.
Private Matters takes an approach to estate planning that is adviser-friendly but not adviser-centric.
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 practical and personal, said managing director Martin Hubbard.
“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, referring to the more structured and programmatic approaches taken at both Executor's Resource and Plan Your Legacy.
“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.” he said.
One example of a service provided by Private Matters is the ability to leave timed e-mail messages that can be sent on a specific date or within a certain time range after your site has been unlocked (meaning someone has notified them of your passing).
The site also enables users to indicate the disposition of items after death. Mr. Hubbard, for example, has a collection of medals his father was awarded for service in World War II. Using the site, he's noted the person he wants to take possession of the medals at his death.
An initial subscription to Private Matters costs $69.99, then $12 per year thereafter. A seven-day free trial is available.
For more information visit the
Private Matters website.
Engage with Grace
There's a touching and tragic story behind the Engage With Grace site.
The story involves a young mother, Rosaria Vandenberg, who at 32 was diagnosed with a terminal illness. Before she died, her family insisted that she be released from the hospital so that she could hold her young daughter one last time. She wouldn't have had the chance if she had stayed in the hospital.
It was this tragic course of events that gave rise to the Engage with Grace movement. The idea behind the movement and site is straightforward: offer a simple tool to help get these difficult conversations started, something that can be shared easily with anyone. That tool is a single slide with five questions on it that can be sent in an e-mail or shared as a slide in a presentation.
The first question: On a scale of one to five where do you fall on this continuum, with one being, “Let me die in my own bed without any medical intervention,” to five, “Don't give up on me now matter what, try any proven or unproven intervention possible.”
While not exactly dinner party fare, the questions are designed to trigger a conversation about the subject and possibly get the message to someone who could act on your behalf should the worst happen. The other questions: “Where would you prefer to die, at home or in the hospital?; does someone understand what you'd like done if you had a terminal illness?; Is there someone you trust that you've appointed to act as an advocate on your behalf when the time is near?; Have you created a living will, appointed a health care power of attorney, or completed an advanced directive?
There's a link on the site to another tool for completing living wills and health care proxies as well (doyourproxy.org).
Just in case you think the answers to the questions aren't important, consider this: 73% of Americans say they would prefer to die at home but upwards of 50% of U.S. citizens die in a hospital. Likewise, eight out of 10 people say it is “very” or “somewhat” important to write down end of life wishes, yet only 36% actually have done so.
There is no charge to use the Engage with Grace site.
For more information visit
Engage with Grace.
