Estate Planning Is No Longer a “Nice to Have” Add-On Service for Advisors

The widening gap between what clients expect and what most practices deliver is reshaping how advisors compete, and which ones get to ‘keep the family’. 

 

For most of my time in this industry, estate and legacy planning sat in a familiar place on an advisor’s roadmap: somewhere between “we should probably get to that” and “I’ll refer you to an attorney when the time comes.” But that positioning is no longer defensible. 

The data has been piling up for years, and recent industry research has made the picture impossible to ignore. Roughly 93% of clients say they want estate planning guidance from their financial advisor. Yet only 22% report actually receiving it, and up to 40% say they would switch advisors to get it. 

Layer in the Cerulli Associates projection that approximately $124 trillion in household wealth will move between generations through 2048  (with women expected to control more than $30 trillion of that) and a different industry begins to take shape. One where the advisors who treat estate planning as a courtesy lose ground to the ones who treat it as the foundation to a healthy financial plan. 

The gap is structural, not personal 

When most advisors haven’t been doing estate planning conversations consistently, it is rarely because they don’t want to. It's usually because the workflow doesn’t exist in their practice, yet. Estate planning sits next to compliance concerns, unfamiliar legal language, the unauthorized practice of law, and the general anxiety of stepping outside the lane the advisor was trained in. So the topic gets handed off to a local attorney, delayed, or referred out completely, and the opportunity to build a relationship with the family quietly thins from there. 

What's changed isn't the willingness of advisors, it's the cost of avoidance.

Caring.com’s 2024 estate planning survey found that 67% of Americans have no estate plan. When they pass without a plan, the assets move, the heirs change advisors, and the family relationship the original advisor spent a decade building disappears within a year. That's not a marketing problem - it's a practice-strategy problem. 

The wealth transfer doesn’t wait for advisors to be ready 

The Great Wealth Transfer is often discussed as a future event; but it's happening right now, and is accelerating every year.

The advisors who will retain assets through it have few characteristics in common, and none of them are about product.

They engage both spouses, not just the one who shows up to the review. They know the names of their clients’ adult children, and those children know them. They have a written framework that documents what should happen, who is in charge, and how the money serves the family’s purpose, not just the family’s tax position. And they remain involved (in some defined capacity) after the primary client passes.

That last piece is where many practices quietly bleed AUM. Historically, the majority of widows and adult heirs change advisors within a year of inheriting. The reason is almost always the same: they were never in the room where the real conversations were happening, and they never built a relationship with the advisor. The plan was built around the original client, not the family, and the trust didn’t transfer with the assets. 

 

Products is not the unmet need in our industry.  

A lot has been written lately about the rise of estate planning technology, and it deserves the attention. Modern platforms have made it possible to draft documents in hours that used to take weeks, and to keep them updated as life changes. I consider that to be real progress. 

 

But product and software alone doesn't close the 93%-to-22% gap alone. Sure, it makes the documents easier to produce, but it doesn't make the conversation easier to have, the family easier to gather, the trust easier to fund, or the heirs easier to retain. Those are process problems, and they live on the advisor’s side of the relationship.
 

This is where I see the industry quietly bifurcating. On one side are the do-it- yourself models  (software platforms that hand the advisor or the client a set of documents and let them figure out the rest). On the other side are done-for-you models that run the whole client experience end-to-end: intake, attorney review, drafting, signing, funding the trust, and bringing the next generation into the conversation early.
 

Both have a place.

The relevant question for an advisor today isn’t which technology to license. It's which of these two operating models matches the kind of practice you want to run five years from now. 

What advisors should do this quarter 

If estate and legacy planning is going to move from “add-on service” to “lead conversation” inside a practice, three things have to happen in the near term. 

First, redefine the first meeting. 

The opening conversation with a prospect should not be about products, performance, or paperwork. It should be about what the family wants their wealth to protect, support, and produce - and whether their current documents reflect that. That single shift surfaces beneficiary errors, titling problems, and gaps that no risk-tolerance questionnaire will ever find. 

Second, build a process you can repeat.

Whether you build it internally, partner with attorneys directly, or outsource it through a done-for-you system like ePIC Services Company offers, the goal is the same: a defined sequence of meetings that takes a family from intake to a funded plan without depending on the advisor to draft documents or practice law. 

 

Third, get the next generation in the room. 

Not at the funeral. Not at the reading. Now. The single most reliable predictor of whether assets stay with an advisor through a generational transition is whether the advisor has a relationship with the heirs before the transfer happens. 

 

Where the industry is headed 

I built ePIC Services Company because I believed advisors were being asked to compete on the wrong axis. They were told to “differentiate” while being handed the same product lineup as everyone else. Estate and legacy planning, done properly, is the most powerful differentiator most practices will ever have access to! It's the conversation clients actually want to have. 

 

The advisors who recognize that, and who put a real process behind it, won’t need to argue about whether estate planning is a “nice to have.” They will already be the practice other firms are trying to catch up to. 

 

Carter Wilcoxson is the Founder & CEO of ePIC Services Company, a turnkey, attorney-backed estate and legacy planning system for financial advisors, insurance agents, IMOs, BGAs, RIAs, and broker-dealers. Through its Outsourced Estate Planning Team (OEPT), ePIC has supported the completion of more than 1,000 estate plans for advisor clients nationwide.