Seven Days, Seven Advisors: Reviewing Estate Plans During Estate Planning Awareness Week

There's a particular tone people use for "I already did my will." It's the tone of someone who has finished the dishes, taken out the trash, and would like credit. Fair enough. Signing is a real accomplishment. Advisors just have follow-up questions.

National Estate Planning Awareness Week runs October 19, through October 25. Most of the talk will be about starting an estate plan. Nobody throws a parade for the one that's already signed, so I asked the Trust & Will Financial Advisor Contributor Panel about it: what do you check first with clients, and what's the outdated detail you see most often?

Monday: When Did You Last Look?

Bob Chitrathorn, CFP®, CPFA®, Co-Founder & CFO of Simplified Wealth Management, has one question ready for any client who says the will is done: "When was the last time you actually looked at it?" It's a question with a long pause built in. His reasoning fits in a single line. "Having an estate plan and having one that still reflects your life are two different things."

He starts with what has moved since signing day: a marriage or divorce, a new grandchild, a business sold, a move to another state. Quite a lot can happen between a signature and a second look. "Those things can make a good plan outdated pretty quickly," Bob said, "and sometimes people don't realize it."

For fellow Advisors, that second look doesn't have to wait for the client to dig out the folder, either. If the plan was drafted somewhere else, you can upload the client's existing documents, wills and trusts included, to Trust & Will's advisor platform, and the AI builds an estate plan summary you can edit and share with your client as a PDF.

Every review now runs through Bob’s three buckets of people, property, and purpose. He says the framework "keeps the conversation focused on the client's life today, instead of just checking whether the paperwork is technically complete." Hold onto those buckets. The rest of the week fills them up.

Tuesday: Read the Names

Chitra Patel, CFP®, CPWA®, Founder and CEO of WealthWorth, tells clients that "signing estate planning documents isn't the finish line." Whoever crossed that line in 2016 is, technically, still in the race.

Her review starts with the roles: the executor, the trustee, the agents for financial and healthcare decisions, and the guardians for minor children. Picture an emergency contact list that still has your college roommate on it, then give the roommate legal authority.

Monday's summary earns its keep here. It lays out a client's roles and assets at a glance, so you can walk into the meeting already knowing who's named and ask whether they still should be.

"The outdated detail I see most often is simply people," she said. "A document may have been perfectly appropriate when it was signed, but years later, relationships and circumstances have changed."

Wednesday: Go Ghost Hunting

Midweek calls for something spooky, and Matthew Veland, Financial Planner with Prudential Advisors, has one.

He runs every planning client through the same review, whether or not they say the will is handled. First on his list: beneficiaries. "The first thing I check is beneficiaries, and it's often the most outdated detail," Matthew said.

He shares a story of a new client who was the beneficiary of a family trust. They went through her documents together, and there it was. Still listed as her beneficiary: an ex-boyfriend from a decade earlier. Ten years later, he was still on the payroll.

Matthew kept it gentle. "Are you still seeing this person? Would you want this person to inherit your family's estate if you passed? Do you think we should update this?" Without that review, the money would have passed outside the family. The fix was "one of the first things that we updated," he said. "That's my spooky story for October."

Forget haunted houses. Sometimes ghost hunting happens right in the client review. 

If you'd rather find your own ghost before the client does, Trust & Will's AI Estate Assistant can answer questions about a client's plan and uploaded documents, beneficiary details included. The forms on retirement accounts and insurance policies still live with each account, so those are worth asking about out loud.

Thursday: Ask Four Simple Questions

For a lot of people, estate planning sits on the to-do list between "clean the gutters" and "call the dentist." It gets the same treatment once it's done: crossed off, never thought about again.

David Wright Jr., Managing Principal of WrightWay Legacy Services, has watched that happen. "They signed the documents, put them away, and mentally checked estate planning off the list," he said. "But life continues to change after the documents are signed."

His review rests on four questions: what has changed in the family, in the assets, and in the people trusted to carry out decisions, and finally, whether the estate plan still reflects all three?

Signing is also where a lot of follow-through quietly stalls. For clients who build their plans with Trust & Will, your advisor dashboard tracks progress on steps like trust funding and deed transfers, so you can see what's actually done and what's still waiting.

Friday: What's New Since Signing?

Five years. That's Al Faber's trigger.

Al, CFP®, Founder of DIWY Financial Planning, pulls out a checklist when a client's documents turn five. Five years is long enough to pick up a new job and a new dog. "I've rarely seen anyone go five years without any changes," he said. One question on the list stands out: have you opened any new accounts since your documents were signed?

His planning tools won't flag it for him. "One of the shortfalls of our financial planning tools is it doesn't tell us when an account was open," Al said. So he asks out loud, the old-fashioned way. Every new account arrives with a beneficiary line of its own, and each one needs to match the estate plan.

When the answer means the plan needs a change, a Trust & Will plan can be updated online. Every plan comes with a free year of the Unlimited Update Service, and clients can keep it going after that for a small fee, so the fix doesn't mean starting over.

Saturday: Skip The Guilt

Saturday is for the fixing, and Lisa White Burns, Founder and Financial Wellness Coach at Her Path, LLC, wants it done without a lecture. Many of her clients arrive mid-chapter: a divorce, a remarriage, an empty nest, a new caregiving role. Their estate plans haven't kept up with the chapter. "An ex-spouse is still listed," Lisa said. "An adult child who was once a minor is still being treated like one."

Divorce is the classic. Everybody means to fix it. Everybody also means to start going to the gym. "I'll get to it. I'll take him off. I'll take her off," Lisa said, doing her best impression of a client. "And man, it doesn't always happen."

When someone has waited 25 years, she skips the question of why. "Life got in the way." She'd rather talk about where the client is now.

Her pitch is that estate plans are "living, breathing documents that evolve as their life evolves," which makes them the only legal paperwork with a pulse. One reason she likes Trust & Will for keeping up with that: "It's virtual, it's always up there. You can always tap into it, make changes."

Sunday: Add It To The Agenda

Sunday is when next week's meetings take shape, so it's the right day for Julie Gawarecki of Prestige Wealth Advisors. Client meetings tend to orbit account balances and where the market is headed. "You forget about the touchy-feely parts of being an advisor unless you actually tangibly put that in the agenda," she said.

Advisors, your clients already did the hard part. This Estate Planning Awareness Week, pick one 'I already did my will' client and open the conversation together. Odds are you'll find something worth fixing, and fixing it is a lot smaller than starting over.

Interested in partnering with Trust & Will to support your own clients' estate planning needs? Learn more about how you can join over 20,000 financial advisors and firms who are delivering peace of mind to their clients by offering a comprehensive estate planning solution. Sign up for free today.