Articles

Military service can shape a family’s finances long after a client leaves the military. Retirement income, survivor benefits, life insurance, and access to care may all depend on decisions made years earlier. An estate plan needs to account for those benefits alongside the client’s investments, property, and family priorities. For financial advisors, the central question […]

Your firm may help clients prepare for retirement, review their estate plans, and make more informed tax decisions. But would someone researching your firm on ChatGPT understand that? On November 10, 2026, OpenAI introduced Businesses in ChatGPT in beta. Eligible businesses can claim their profiles, contribute current information, and see insights into how they appear […]

A client gets promoted, buys a home, welcomes a child, and starts receiving equity compensation. Their financial life looks very different from five years ago. Their estate plan may still look exactly the same. For advisors working with affluent Millennial clients, this is a useful place to begin. Millennials, commonly defined as people born between […]

A vacation home represents something far more meaningful than real estate. It’s where children spent their summers, where generations gathered for holidays, and where some of life’s most treasured memories were made. It’s understandable, then, that parents often dream of passing these properties down to their children, hoping the home will remain a gathering place […]

A trust can be hundreds of pages long. It can involve multiple trustees, generations of beneficiaries, carefully drafted distribution standards, and sophisticated tax planning. And yet, the person whose wealth it governs may still struggle to answer a basic question: What actually happens under this trust if my life changes? That question is getting a […]

A client shares a trust, a will or a tax return. Inside those documents are details that could shape some of the most important financial decisions their family will make. For advisors, understanding those details and knowing which questions to ask can take significant time. Ester helps advisors move that work forward. Today at Schwab […]

For your clients, personalized tax planning is an expectation. And as a financial advisor, you know that tax strategies should reflect each client’s income sources, residency, business ownership, and long-term goals. But delivering truly customized guidance across hundreds of households creates operational inefficiency as clients ask for more precision and accountability. This gap creates a […]

For the past several years, much of the conversation around artificial intelligence in wealth management has focused on efficiency. Can AI summarize a meeting? Draft an email? Search a knowledge base? Prepare for a client review faster? Those applications matter. But they may also be obscuring the much larger shift taking place. In its 2026 […]

At EstateCon 2026, four of the most influential leaders in wealth management took the stage with a unified conviction. Joanne Bradford, Strategic Advisor to Wealth.com; Kathie Chao, Managing Director at Charles Schwab; Kate Shackleton, Executive Managing Partner at Mercer Advisors; and Shannon Spotswood, CEO of RFG Advisory, made it clear: the Great Wealth Transfer will […]

A bank and an independent advisory firm may use estate and tax planning technology to help clients answer many of the same questions. How will their wealth transfer? How do their estate documents fit together? What planning opportunities deserve attention? But the environments in which that technology must operate can look very different. For an […]

A strong year-end plan starts before year-end feels urgent. October still gives advisors time to find the issues. November creates room to compare options and make decisions. By December, the work needs to move from recommendation to execution. Too often, all three phases are compressed into one year-end client meeting agenda. The advisor reviews performance, […]

New parents leave the hospital with feeding schedules, pediatric appointments, insurance forms, and very little sleep. A will rarely makes the first-week list. Yet the birth or adoption of a child changes nearly every part of a family’s financial and estate plan. There is now someone who depends on the parents for care, income, housing, […]