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Amber Kuhn  

TPR nation we’ve got some incredible news. TPR live just got bigger and better. Thanks to overwhelming demand, we now have a larger space and more seats available. Imagine being in the room with two industry rock stars who crack the code on running wildly successful practices. This is your chance to learn directly from Matt and Micah in person as they dive into value adds and feeds and connect with other advisors who are ready to deliver massive value and transform the industry. And if you’re looking for how you can help your clients through tax planning, stick around for the Retirement Tax Services Tax Summit. TPR nation, I want to see you there, so don’t let this life changing event pass you buy. Join us this September in Arizona for an experience that will redefine your career. Visit theperfectria.com/live and shave your seat today. 

Matthew Jarvis  

Hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of The Perfect RIA podcast. I’m your co host, Matthew Jarvis, and with me today, special guest Danny Lohrfink, who is the co founder of wealth.com if you’re not familiar with wealth.com it is a phenomenal estate planning tool for getting clients to actually get their estate documents done. It’s something that I use in my practice. We’ve been proud to partner with Danny and wealth.com at the Retirement Tax Services Summit last year and again this year, Danny, thanks so much for coming to the show. 

Danny Lohrfink  

Thanks for having me. 

Matthew Jarvis  

Now, if you guys haven’t met Danny yet, it’s because you’re not at conferences. Because I swear that Danny and his team are at every single conference I see. And did I gotta confess, I feel like I’m pretty good on efficiency, like I feel like I really have this dialed in. But when you came to the RTS tax summit last year, we got done, and you said, Hey, Matt, do you want to have this TV? And it was a, it was a team. We were in Vegas, my hometown, TV that was on your your your table, and it’s what, even though I want to have this TV. And he said, when I go to conferences, I don’t try to ship a TV. I just buy one there and I find someone to give it away to. And at first I thought, man, these guys, these startups, wealth.com, like they’re just blowing money. But then you help me understand, like, what was the TV? Like, 100 bucks at Best Buy. There’s no way it would have shipped. It would have for sure, bro. So I was just impressed at that, that little hack there.

Danny Lohrfink  

Well, you know, it’s a little bit of a don’t miss the forest for the trees type moment. I mean, it’s a very small thing, but, yeah, you’re right. It’s a 250 TV, 55 inch CV, and to ship it, to ship it back, it would actually cost more money than to leave it or give it to someone that it could really help them in their life, right? And so offering it a lady or whoever, but that’s actually the way that we approach. You mentioned a conference circuit, yeah, attending, attending conferences. I mean at wealth.com, we don’t really spend a lot of money on marketing. You’re not really going to see us a ton on LinkedIn or on Google ads. It is a ground game approach, and it’s a word of mouth, really gross story that we’ve seen here at wealth.com where we like to meet people, and we like to marry the technology with this really white glove personal touch. And so typically, if you’re looking at a wealth tech company, they’re probably going to conferences, and they’re thinking to themselves, man, like that’s a big check to cash to write to to go to one of these conferences and to sponsor. But for us, it’s everything, because getting to actually look somebody in the eye and explain to them, the philosophical approach to how we’ve designed a solution specifically to meet the needs of advisors and their clients downstream. I mean, you just can’t really replace that, that in person component.

Matthew Jarvis  

Yeah, I love that. And for advisors listening, who might be tempted to think, Well, wait a second, I’m not doing a FinTech company. I’m not doing this thing. But the same principle applies, like we could all, like Danny in his office, me and my office. We could sit here and wait for the phone to ring or for an email to come in, or we could try to play around on social media and hope that someday someone’s impressed enough to call us. Or we can get out and just just beat the streets and say, I gotta get in front of as many people as I can. I need to look at as many eyeballs as I possibly can. Deliver as much value as I can at the end of day. It’s always going to pay off. Now it’s not just you. Danny, who’s this way, Annie, who’s, what’s Annie’s Chief, Chief guru. She’s like, goddess of legal everything. 

Danny Lohrfink  

And wrote she’s our chief legal officer. And she, I mean, she’s incredible. Her like her resume, she always blushes when we talk about it, but if she’s Yale undergrad. JD, from Columbia, went to the premier trust in estates from the country to cut her teeth at McDermott Will & Emery, and worked on some of the most complicated estates on the West Coast when she went to Perkins Coie. So I mean, she’s got a disteller resume that’s only telling one side of Anne. Anne is a concert pianist. She speaks four different languages, Mandarin, French, Spanish and English, and she’s a gamer.

Matthew Jarvis  

That’s too funny. No way.

Danny Lohrfink  

She’s a big, big time gamer. 

Matthew Jarvis  

I didn’t know that last piece I’ve met at a bunch of times well, and the reason I wanted to bring up and obviously, she’s a great resource on the team. But when I see Anne at conferences, we saw each other at conference recently, always looking to deliver value, right? So when I meet and she says, Hey, how can I help you? How can I help your team? How can I help you do estate planning, random estate planning questions, right? I can reach out to Ann, and she’s helpful there. And I just, again, I want to highlight this mindset of, how can I deliver as much value as possible to the industry and and to consumers? And you’re all talking, let’s jump into a big question that surfaces anytime we’re talking about wealth.com which is, does this put advisors on a spot they’re giving legal advice to clients, right? Like, this is the number one. I feel like this is where the attorney trolls come out. You guys are more delicate than I am. Like, the attorney trolls come out on this thing. And I’m like, give you a break, but, but let’s talk about this kind of elephant in the room. If an advisor is telling a client, Hey, you don’t have a state document, you need to have them. And wealth.com is a great resource. Where is the line being crossed?

Danny Lohrfink  

Yeah, honestly, it’s a question that needs to be asked, a question that you should shy away from. And anyone that does shy away from this question like, be wary of it, right? First and foremost, an advisor’s role. They think about their clients, holistic, wealth, fiction and so you think about that family office like experience that’s coming downstream. Clients expect you to be thinking about their wealth holistically. And of course, the estate plan is the bookend any good financial plan. How do you build a financial plan without knowing what the end game is? And you think about the modules of the CFP, well, like there’s an entire estate planning module in the CFP, right? Why is that? Well, because legacy planning is critical, critical, critical for advisors to be on top of now, what should advisors be doing? Legacy planning? Yeah, you should be absolutely talking to your clients about their goals, their objectives, their concerns. Do you do you have any charitable inclinations? Do you want to potentially give money to charity upon your death? Do you get along with all these different children of yours without nieces and nephews? Who might you want to serve as the guardian for your kids? Here’s some things to think about when thinking about who to nominate as a guardian for your children, what happens to your pets, your little puppy that you love? Do you want it ending up in a shelter like these are like these are very, very clean conversations for advisors to have totally now where it starts to tip over the line is when an advisor starts to say, Okay, you should have a marital sub trust in your documents. Sure. You should have a trust for your descendants that should terminate at the age of 25 or even, you should have a will, right? And so there are some solutions out there that allow advisors to literally select the types of documents and the underlying constructs of the documents for their clients. Wealth.com actually doesn’t allow that. What we do is we put advisors in that central quarterback position to literally have all those meaningful, meaty conversations around the legacy planning, global objectives and concerns. But then wealth.com takes those responses and we we take on a liability to translate it into the legal function. So we will ingest those goals and objectives, and we will then say, All right, then you should have a trust based estate plan that is a joint revital trust between the two spouses. And because it’s a blended family and it’s a second marriage. Maybe you want to have a marital sub trust in there. Oh, you have, you have kids that are on the age of 15. You worry that if you pass away too soon, they are going to have a huge windfall too early, and you’re self at the age of 18, and you inherit money at 18 years old. You want to have different distribution breakdowns, great wealth.com takes that into consideration. It says you should have a descendants. Here’s the optimal way to implement it. So that’s kind of the fine line. There is talk about the goals, the objectives, the concerns, but then leave it to the experts like wealth.com to translate that instantly, of course, because we’re leveraging technology, but translate that into that into legal clarification.

Matthew Jarvis  

That’s a great distinction, right? And maybe to draw a couple of more lines around that, right? So obviously, talking about estate planning, like not a problem. It’s actually something you literally need to be doing as part of the CFP curriculum. But if you cross lines, like, if you were drawing up documents, you’re gonna have a big problem. If you were logging into wealth.com Before clients and typing this stuff in, that’s a that’s a big problem.

Danny Lohrfink  

Which, by the way, Matthew, we’ve actually fired a partner of ours because we found out that they were doing you

Matthew Jarvis  

Absolutely cannot do that. You can’t do that. 

Danny Lohrfink  

And there’s no room within our advisory community to go outside the bounce. I mean, we work with over 400 Wealth Management institutions today, 1000s of financial advisors, and the reason why we’ve been successful is because you really only work with the financial advisory community all this thinking for you to, like, let us do that please, because you’re bad at like, don’t, yeah, it’s not a good idea from a legal standpoint. 

Matthew Jarvis  

And you’re as an advisor, I’m going to be bad at that. You don’t, don’t, don’t go down that path to you. Danny, this is something that advisors, we need to remember. You have to have hard lines in the sand. You have to say, hey, there’s things I’m not going to turn a blind eye to. So I mean, wealth.com could say, like, Well, hey, listen, we’re not the ones in there typing in, you know, we’re just not going to say anything. But she said, No, like, that’s not acceptable. That’s a problem. Get off the system. Interesting. Dana, I didn’t mention this to you before we hit record. When I was at FBA NorCal and Ann Rhodes and I were chatting, I went later and talked to the ENO provider that was there. I always like talking to the ENO providers. And I was like asking, Hey, where are you seeing ENO claims? And so they tell me some horror stories. And I say, have you seen any EO claims on people giving tax advice or people giving legal advice, like crossing that line? And they sat back, and they said, they get this is not official. This is when I was chatting with them. They said, No, we actually see the opposite. They say, we’ve been paying a huge amount of claims out on advisors who did not advise on taxes and who did not advise on estate planning. Specifically, the ENO providers are having to pick up the income and estate tax bills for advisors who did not advise their clients so did. We’ll see like, the opposite extreme. We’re seeing like, Hey, listen, like, I don’t want to get involved in legal planning. You can be liable for that. This isn’t something you can turn a blind eye to.

Danny Lohrfink  

I mean, think about it this way. Matthew, yeah, you have all this portfolio alpha that you’re trying to generate, right? You’re trying to find the best managers, the best whatever, but then you’re just going to completely ignore the tax alpha, right? Like, how does that make any sense? Especially if you’re Do you have any high net worth or ultra high net worth clients? With the sunset at the tax cuts and Jobs Act, it’s taking the estate exemption threshold from an all time high where it is today, at 13.6 1 million per individual, and it’s cutting it in half, which means if you have clients that like, might end up passing away with a total taxable estate that’s like, $7 million or more, which like, if they have $4 million today and they’re in their 40s or something like, very likely that they will, they’re going to, yeah, right, then you have to be thinking about Taking advantage of the all time high exemption thresholds today, starting to move some money outside of their taxable estate, because you can actually fully erode the entirety of the portfolio alpha that you generate because you didn’t think ahead to the fact that, hey, if the client passes away post sunset with $8 million taxable estate and the threshold is 7 million, well, they’re above by a million, and Uncle Sam is going to hit them with a 40% tax bill on that 1 million over writing a $400,000 check to Uncle Sam. Well, client ain’t going to be too happy with your negligence there.

Matthew Jarvis  

Yeah, especially when their estate planning attorney says, Hey, listen, you could have avoided this $400,000 tax if you had called me earlier, right? So you know, there’s, there’s a bus to be, to be backed up there, yeah, well, and Danny, let’s step even a different level, kind of the massive fluid, even if you’re listening to you’re saying, Well, hey, my clients aren’t at that level. We still have these issues with Power of Attorney documents. We still have community property agreements. There’s such an illusion that estate planning is for, like, the ultra high net worth or whatever that, whatever that means, every client of yours needs estate documents and all of their children, which is something I’ve really enjoyed with wealth that comes out. Saying to clients like, Hey, listen, have your adult kids got their estate documents done? And most clients tell me, I don’t know, but I suspect the answer is no, young people haven’t done it. Great news. We have this great resource you can use, and it’s been really positive with clients to say, even if your documents are taken care of, or if your level of complexity is beyond what can be through wealth.com. Greeners use this resource for your family. 

Danny Lohrfink  

Well, I love that you guys do that, Matthew, because the way that we price our solution is not per client, it’s not per document. It’s a subscription cost where you guys buy a subscription to wealth.com and then you’re able to get whoever within your book of business, even if it’s not in your book business, use it as a prospecting tool to go to the local church and say, hey, I want to get everybody here within the congregation set up with estate planning documents at no cost, and use it as a prospecting tool to bring in. I love that you get with kids of your clients, because it goes back to that old adage, like you do something for me when you’re paying me and like, I expect that, but if you do something for my family or for my friends, like now, I’ll remember that forever. I love that you do that because, I mean, again, there’s no additional cost per document or per client to be able to do it. I mean, it’s all included in that subscription cost. 

Matthew Jarvis  

I love that it’s priced away. I was recently talking to a FinTech provider who won’t be named here in a in a different, adjacent space, and we were kind of going through the offering. It was pretty cool. But then I was doing the math. I said, Hey, if I do this for all of my clients, it’s going to cost me $70,000 yeah, it’s not that great. I can’t pay $70,000 for this. He says, Well, just do it for your favorite clients. Cool. That one will be great. You know, like, finds out that I didn’t do it for all my clients, or something like that. So I love how the model is set up. Well, Danny, you you’ve worked with a lot of advisors. I mean, this is exclusive wealth.com does works with financial advisors and their clients. What are some of the real success stories you’ve seen with advisors, either specific to wealth.com in general, because, again, you’re working with hundreds of advisory firms. You’re seeing a lot of things that the average person has not seen.

Danny Lohrfink  

I’ll give you a few examples. One firm, they’ve instituted, you know, through their onboarding checklist of any new clients, estate plan checkup. And so you’re a new client, you are onboarding with the financial advisory institution. And the question is asked, Do you have an existing estate plan? If the answer is yes, then they get the estate planning document, they upload it to wealth.com system, run it through our AI extraction technology, and then bring it to life through a visual report showing the client how their existing trust or will looks now, if the answer is no, then they embed as part of that process a 40 minute session to think through the legacy planning goals, objectives, and then they go ahead and the client creates document in conjunction with the advisor. Kind of walk through each step along the way. And so literally, within six months, they’ve gotten 50 of their new clients through the door and set up with estate planning documents. So that’s that’s one way to do it, through wealth.com you also, we have a network of trusting estate attorneys that are barred in every single state. So like, if at the end of the process you have that document, you have this instantly generated, you know, pretty visual report, but you’re like, look, I would just rather have an attorney that barred in in my state give it a once over. Like, no problem. Like, we have that plug and play as well. So some advisors, they actually mandate as part of the process that, okay, we’re going to go through this, we’re going to create the document, but before you sign it, meet with one of those attorneys. Now, another example of a great success story that we’ve seen is advisors that are monetizing this. So Cambridge, for instance, Cambridge broker dealer, they have wealth.com approved for advisors to use, but also for advisors to charge clients for legacy planning sessions. So what we find is that advisors are making wealth.com not just a value add and be able to deliver estate planning solutions to their clients, but it’s actually a profit center for them. And so what they do is they pay the subscription license to wealth.com and then they will then host these legacy planning sessions with their clients, talking through goals and objectives. Because again, like you’re spending your time, you’re spending like your expertise to help your clients think through this stuff. And they’re charging anywhere between $750 up to $2,000 for these legacy planning sessions. And so after just like reliance, not only is the money made back, but it starts to become a profit set. 

Matthew Jarvis  

Yeah, it really is. I want to draw out something here for our advisors listening. It’s fun. We have listeners standing across the entire spectrum, right from Ras to Edward Jones guys to Merrill guys to everything in between. Yeah, if you are on a more compliance restricted platform, and they say, Hey, listen, I don’t know if we’re going to offer wealth.com or allow that to happen. What I like to do in that situation, you need to do this very gently, is pull on wealth.com website the list of all the firms they’re working with, including Cambridge, reach back out to your compliance officer. Say, Hey, I really appreciate this. Supporting is important. I really appreciate you trying to keep us in line with the rules. Can you help me understand these firms are able to offer this, and we’re not right? Can you help me understand so this is a good framework. You’re not trying to be the first firm to use wealth.com there’s all these other groups using it. So that’s always a great approach. Now, if you go to compliance and say, Hey, that’s not fair, and I don’t like you, you’re going to get nowhere. But again, that approach of help me understand how all these other firms are using it and charging for is great, great approach on compliance. Danny, other examples, I love this Cambridge group that they’re charging for it as part of their financial planning process. That’s incredible. The group that’s gotten their last 50 clients set up with it also incredible. Any other examples that come to mind? 

Danny Lohrfink  

Yeah there’s a firm called LifeWorks. They have embedded estate planning joined by a gentleman by the name of Ron bolas. He’s fabulous super tech. They had embedded estate planning as part of their prospecting practice. And so they said, Look, we’re going to give away estate plans for free to prospects to bring them in the door. And so they pay a subscription to wealth.com of course, they’re getting all of their clients set up. But then they’re going around and thinking, Hey, do you need to get set up with any estate planning documents? Let me take care of you. And then they buy you that process. Start to understand what actually is in the client’s estate Right? Like your estate plan is a plan for your estate which is like everything that you own, like everything that, like you have oversight over while you’re still alive, and so it allows you to start to get insights into like the client’s assets or the prospects asset retirement accounts, to what are in their their brokerage accounts. Are there any advisory accounts? Where do they live? Do they have multiple homes? And by uncovering that all of a sudden, you can not only move forward with the estate plan, but you can also start to trickle in some Hey, have you thought about this on the financial planning or on the tax planning side? And all of a sudden, the doors bust wide open, and that prospect becomes a full time client. So this firm Life Works, I think, does a fabulous job.

Matthew Jarvis  

That’s an incredible strategy, because it’s it focuses on this key point of what’s in it for them, right? If we lined up 10 financial advice or 1000 all but one would sound like, Hey, I think I’m the best. So you should come talk to me like that’s really the extent of almost every advisor’s marketing. I think I’m the best, therefore come talk to me and life works. Your point is saying, let’s not even talk about if I’m good or not. Let me just help you in this area, like it’s so important to me that everyone I know has a state documents we’ve actually created, bought this service. It’s available to you to have been in our community, our niche, or whatever the case may be. Now that one advisor is not just head and shoulders. They’re playing a completely different game, and so anywhere, especially in prospecting, where I can play a different game, hands down, that’s where I’m going to win. So that’s an incredible story. Dan, I appreciate you sharing that. 

Danny Lohrfink  

Well. I mean, you talk about all the time, deliver value like Well, are you talking about value that might manifest itself 10 years down the road, right? Or are you talking about value right now? If you’re working with a prospect and you’re like, look, my investment philosophy is going to pay dividends in 10 years or 15 years. Like, that’s a pretty hard sell. But if you’re working with a prospect, you’re like, Hey, I’m gonna get you set up with a trust tomorrow. 

Matthew Jarvis  

Yeah, yeah, that’s incredible. I mean, I use that in my prospect process. In that I say, hey, this process is designed to help you make an educated and informed decision about our firm. And great news, you can take the same process and evaluate any other firm, but I’m thinking Danny from this angle of wealth.com. Right? I can say, hey, in this process, you are actually going to end this process with your estate documents completed, whether we decide to work together or not. So, worst case scenario, you’re going to have these documents done. It’s been on your list for years. And if you decide to hire another firm, and we’re not a good fit, like, that’s awesome, but you’re going to leave with a tangible deliverable, versus, like in almost every other shop is saying, like, hey, I’ll hand you 100 page Monte Carlo illustration. You won’t know what it means, but please work with me for sure.

Danny Lohrfink  

For sure. I mean, all kind of been on the other side of it in some degree with other services that we came to it. But, like, think about it from the from the perspective of the end client. Like, you can only talk about the Sharpe ratio so many times before they’re like, Dude, I get I get it.

Matthew Jarvis  

I don’t get I just don’t hear about it anymore. Yeah, exactly, exactly, that is awesome. Well, Danny, it’s okay. Appreciate wealth.com as a part as a great, valuable resource to members. Of course, your team will be at the retirement Tax Services Tax summit in Tempe, Arizona, September 25 the 27th excited to see you there. But this podcast is, of course, about taking action. So in addition to visiting wealth.com and doing a demo, what are some action items that come to mind for you? For our advisors who are listening. 

Danny Lohrfink  

Yeah, some of the best advisors, they in their Salesforce or wealthbox or rental, whatever CRM system that they’re using, they will actually segment their book of business and start to create little widgets that say, all right, which clients do not have estate plans. Which clients do have estate plans? Now, if the clients do have estate plans, when’s the last time that we reviewed it? That’s a very simple widget, but allows you to really keep track of your clients and where they sit on their estate planning journeys. Of course at wealth.com, you can do all that through our advisor portal, and we have direct API integrations directly into Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics and Redtail and wealth. So we can do that for you, but even if you don’t use wealth.com I recommend doing that because it allows you to actually take the first step of thinking about your clients and starting to think about their different needs. If they do have estate plans, how can we approach it and embed it as part of our annual portfolio review process, and if they don’t have estate plans, how can we start getting them set up? Because, again, that’s the point that we discussed earlier. It’s almost negligence to allow your client to continue to operate without the end to their financial plan. 

Matthew Jarvis  

Yeah, I’m gonna even for an action. I’m gonna take that, take that one step further, unless you’ve done this in the last year, the last 12 months. Take this calendar quarter and go through as your value add. Take this quarter from every single client’s estate plan. Danny, to your point, if they don’t have one, or you don’t have a record of it, great news. Time to reach out if they do have one. Great news, time to reach out, let them know. Hey, it still looks current, or if it’s way out of date, great news. We need to update this. But yeah, Danny, I’m 100% on board every advisor CRM needs to have in there. What estate documents do we have when they last updated? This is not an optional area. Well. Danny, hey, thank you so much for being on the show. I appreciate all the great stuff that you and your team are putting out in industry. I look forward to seeing you in September and for all of our listeners until next time, happy planning.

Amber Kuhn  

TPR nation. You know that it’s a competitive market out there, so how are you standing out as an advisor while still having a streamlined process? If you’re looking for a way to provide value and help your clients with estate planning, then it’s time for you to download our Estate Planning Guide help your clients document their final wishes to ensure peace of mind. Visit theperfectria.com/estateguide to get your access today.