Best estate planning bolt-ons for new RIAs
Going RIA is often compared to being in a candy shop. With so much candy – or tools – to choose from, it can be overwhelming to narrow down the best flavors.
The same can be said when it comes to choosing a bolt-on provider. Luckily, there’s already quite a few who have made a name for themselves and are being actively chosen among advisors as their go-to estate planning, tax planning and insurance provider.
Chuck Failla, CEO and Founder of Sovereign Financial, attests that estate planning is at the forefront of bolt-ons, remarking on the great wealth transfer.
Vanilla, wealth.com, EncoreEstate and Trust & Will are the leading players when it comes to estate planning, as Failla points out. These four bolt-on providers are providing solutions for advisors to implement some type of estate planning, or at minimum, estate organizing, as he likes to call it.
“Estate organizing is just ‘Let’s make sure all your beneficiary designations are correct. Do you have things in trust that should be in trust? Do you have a trust that’s not funded yet?’ Things like this,” he says.
Ironically, Failla noted RIAs can go without having a bolt-on as part of their firms, as they can also manage them in-house. It just requires more work as a one-stop shop RIA.
“In our world, you have the estate plan, you have the CPA and you have the insurance professional. You can send [clients] out, or you could just bring them all in house. It’s just more of an organizational structure more than anything else,” Failla said.
He added most advisors will still weave other ancillary services in. “It’s just a matter of are they going to do it full on as a bolt-on, as part of their organization? Or just do, what has been most traditional, a referral to an outside
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