FreeWill Launches Estately: The First Platform Enabling Financial Advisors to Offer Digital and Attorney-Drafted Estate Planning

News provided by

Oct 29, 2024, 09:00 ET

Estately is powered by FreeWill, trusted by more than one million Americans in creating their estate plans
Estately is the first product that provides both digital self-drafted and attorney-drafted documents on one unified platform
Mercer Advisors^¹ collaborated on design for 18 months as anchor customer and is completing full roll-out; 60+ firms added during the beta period

NEW YORK, Oct. 29, 2024 /PRNewswire/ -- FreeWill, a social-good enterprise at the nexus of philanthropy and estate planning, announced today the launch of Estately. Estately is a software solution that allows financial advisors to offer full-service estate planning as a component of their comprehensive wealth management practices, enabling them to centrally guide each step of the estate planning process.

The estimated $84 trillion^² Great Wealth Transfer poses significant opportunities and challenges for financial advisors. Adeptly navigating this transfer of wealth is critical for retaining and winning future business for any financial advisor. Clients increasingly seek estate planning^³ support today, and roughly three-quarters^⁴ of future heirs prioritize it, signaling the importance of estate planning in establishing long-lasting, intergenerational client relationships.

Unfortunately, financial advisors struggle with numerous pain points when attempting to help their clients with estate planning. Estately delivers a refined approach by:

Improving oversight and visibility into clients' workflows, centralizing a fragmented user journey that frequently involves third-parties or proprietary software
Allowing clients to complete and update estate planning easily, resulting in a high completion rate
Aligning estate planning outputs with the rest of financial planning decisions
Better serving increasingly mobile clients with trusted estate planning attorney coverage spanning all 50 states

Estately leverages the technology and scale of FreeWill, which has already simplified and democratized the estate planning process for more than one million Americans, including more than 15,000 clients of financial advisors in the past six months alone.

Estately serves the full spectrum of financial advisors, bringing tailored solutions for large firms and independent practitioners alike. It is the first platform to fully address both simple and complex needs for clients spanning all 50 states with optionality for a self-directed experience as well as a high-touch attorney-led experience.

"As we've scaled FreeWill from an idea to the most popular online estate planning platform in the country, we continue to constantly receive inbounds from financial advisors who love our platform and want to use it with their clients," said Jenny Xia Spradling, Co-CEO, FreeWill. "We began to recognize that existing solutions for estate planning don't offer a drafting experience that covers all clients. We took the big leap to develop attorney drafting software in order to provide a scalable, consistent experience between attorneys and clients. We married that with our top-rated self-directed drafting technology to create the first truly integrated estate planning drafting platform."

Xia Spradling continued: "Estate planning has, for too long, been a painstakingly patchwork process for financial advisors and their clients. It is no surprise that estate planning has become the fastest growing software category for advisors.^⁵ At the same time, we were only interested in pursuing the space if we saw an opening for a product that could break through the clutter and offer something different to the advisor. In Estately, we believe we have that product, and we are just getting started."

With Estately, advisors and clients have access to documents across all 50 states, and Washington, D.C. These include Wills, Revocable Living Trusts with Pour-over Wills, Durable Financial Powers of Attorney, Advanced Healthcare Directive and HIPAA Authorization, and Beneficiary Designations. Attorney-led experiences are available within Estately for clients with more complex needs.

For more information on Estately, please visit www.getestately.com

About FreeWill

FreeWill is a social-good enterprise offering online tools that empower Americans to address commonly faced estate planning needs and make charitable donations in tax-advantaged ways, all for free. Through its partnerships with 1,500+ nonprofits who understand that major gifts often are part of estate plans, the company is also able to provide a comprehensive suite of estate planning and related tools to consumers free of cost. To date, FreeWill has generated more than $10 billion in planned and real-time gifts for more than 10,000 nonprofits while helping more than 1,000,000 consumers create wills and plan their estates.

Contact

For FreeWill & Estately:

Roger Sauerhaft

[email protected]

^¹ Mercer Global Advisors, Inc. ("Mercer Advisors") is a SEC registered investment adviser. The firm only transacts business in states where they are properly registered, or excluded or exempted from registration requirements.
^² https://www.cerulli.com/press-releases/cerulli-anticipates-84-trillion-in-wealth-transfers-through-2045
^³ https://go.moneyguide.com/l/55042/2022-01-24/kgpn75
^⁴ https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/survey-data-from-freewill-younger-americans-plan-to-get-financial-advisors-when-they-inherit-new-poll-finds-301695236.html
^⁵ https://t3technologyhub.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/2024-T3_Inside-Information-Software-Survey.pdf