Digital assets are a trending topic and becoming an ever-important aspect of estate planning with today’s digital age.  As individuals become digitally savvy and more and more aspects of our everyday life are consumed by technology, planning for clients’ digital afterlife will become standard in estate planning.  What this really means is that planning for digital assets is becoming the elephant in estate planning and at the same time a golden opportunity for estate planners.  This white paper will provide some basic understanding for planning for digital assets.

Let’s face it, humans are very busy. Technology is changing manual processes to create efficiencies. Technology is evolving every day and moving toward replacing jobs that entrepreneurs feel there is an opportunity to disrupt. As technology continuously evolves, we have seen little movement in estate planning technology until recently. 

It appears more and more startups are targeting the practice of document drafting and particularly the area of estate planning. Start-ups like Estate Guru and EP Navigator target financial advisors to move their instant document service through the market. Their primary focus is to produce on the spot documents for advisors’ clients while advisors are in the discovery stage. They even find attorneys in each state to attach their names to the documents.

Estate planning in its simplest form is planning for the transfer of something to someone else. A more accurate synopsis from Wikipedia defines estate planning as the process of anticipating and arranging, during a person's life, for the management and disposal of that person's estate during the person's life and at and after death, while minimizing gift, estate, generation skipping transfer, and income tax.

We interviewed over 100 professionals who engage in estate planning and we found these common potential issues in their businesses. Participating in these errors can lead to a slow death of your business. Below is a helpful guide to understanding the issues and some solutions that may help you in your business.