Journal of Financial Planning: February 2026
Farah Baxter is a cofounder of Soalma, a digital legacy planning platform. She experienced firsthand the challenges families face when critical information is missing after the death of a loved one and is committed to working with financial planners to help clients prepare more comprehensively. She holds an M.B.A. from INSEAD and a B.S. from Boston University. She can be reached HERE.
Marsha Collins has two decades of experience leading financial communications initiatives with financial planners, high-net worth individuals, institutions, and consultants. She holds an M.B.A. from INSEAD, a B.A. from Duke, and the Chartered Alternative Investment Analyst certification from the CFA Institute.
JOIN IN THE DISCUSSION: Discuss this article with fellow FPA Members through FPA's Knowledge Circles.
FEEDBACK: If you have any questions or comments on this article, please contact the editor HERE.
Many financial planners know this scenario all too well.
A couple does “everything right:” a carefully drafted will or a trust, updated powers of attorney, current beneficiary designations, periodic tax reviews. The file appears flawless to any technical reviewer.
However, after the second spouse passes away, missing, conflicting, or misinterpreted information about a loved one’s wishes creates uncertainty, prolonged disputes, and lasting negative consequences for the offspring of the deceased. Perhaps the deed to the house is missing, an insurance policy is lost, or an important financial adviser with crucial information remains unknown or inaccessible. An individual can have a technically impeccable estate plan that still produces confusion, resentment, delays, or lawsuits.
Furthermore, without enough information about the motivation of their loved ones, families could find it difficult to interpret, accept, and execute their wishes. Doubt extends timelines, puts unbearable stress on time-pressured family members, and can lead to large sums of lost assets.
Many real-world outcomes are messy and can drag on for years, amplified by the challenges of today’s demographic context. Today, different generations rarely live in the same home and are often spread out geographically, seeing each other only once or twice a year. Intergenerational estate discussions aren’t often prioritized during these rare and precious times together, exacerbating the knowledge gap around a loved one’s true intent or the location of critical information.
To address these issues, financial planners can elevate traditional estate planning, which focuses on the transfer of assets, by augmenting it with a concept called “legacy planning.” Legacy planning is the structured process of gathering appropriate documents and information that are typically not included in a will/trust. It provides practical information and instructions as well as video or written content that shares messages, explanations, or insights with loved ones.
How Legacy Planning Differs from Estate Planning
Traditional estate planning focuses on the structure of legal instruments, including wills, trusts, powers of attorney, medical directives, tax efficiency, and financial protection such as life insurance. Legacy planning goes beyond dollar symbols to focus on the holistic life of an individual and their family, answering questions that would remain ignored with a typical estate plan, such as the practical details of keeping mortgage payments current, caring for pets or managing property, and accessing important information that is stored physically or digitally. Extending beyond stating who gets what, it serves as a comprehensive, practical instruction manual focusing on execution and continuity.
Essentially, legacy planning simply formalizes and extends the services that financial planners already provide. Many planners already share checklists or provide fill-in-the-blank planning guidebooks on an ad hoc basis. Legacy planning gives financial planners a framework and tools by which they can provide this guidance.
We believe legacy planning activities fall into two categories that financial planners can address jointly: the practical and the emotional.
From the practical side, loved ones obtain valuable information needed to handle the logistical details of someone’s death. This side takes into account contacts, payments, account details, and much more. By proactively preparing loved ones to handle these necessary tasks, legacy planning reduces stress, confusion, conflict, ambiguity, and wasted time.
In contrast, the emotional side provides meaning that can comfort loved ones and potentially allows clients to connect with future generations. It takes into context the narratives or motives behind key decisions and how the distribution of assets will be perceived inside the family, ensuring each heir is emotionally supported. It frames the passing of a life with values, memories, and messages.
Legacy planning entails having intentional conversations during life with loved ones and ensuring the right content is available to help them after a death.
Today’s Context
Today, people move more frequently; often hold multiple real estate properties, bank, investment, and retirement accounts; live far from family members; and manage all their resources digitally. Ten years ago, loved ones could frequently check snail mail for clues. Today, information is often all digital, leaving no paper trail and no immediate access upon the death of a family member.
With these obstacles, traditional estate planning is no longer enough; a shift to more holistic legacy planning is essential. We have found this to be especially true for a range of groups, including seniors reflecting on their own lives, adult children thinking about their aging parents, parents with minor children, and members of high-risk professions including the military, firefighters, and police.
While estate planning is often jurisdiction-specific and limited in scope, legacy planning is universal and works internationally, allowing it to better serve today’s cross-border and blended families.
What Happens When Legacy Is Not Planned
Across demographics, geographies, and income brackets, the same patterns appear when the legacy dimension is not addressed adequately. Families can suffer over misaligned views on medical directives, application of the carefully prepared legal documents, or complete lack of instructions about accounts, passwords, key providers, contact lists, or pending tasks. These challenges make the first weeks and months after a death more difficult than needed.
How Legacy Planning Can Benefit Financial Planners
For financial planners, the absence of explicit legacy work can weaken continuity with the next generation. Heirs who do not know the planner, don’t understand the logic of the plan, or associate it with conflict are far more likely to move their business elsewhere after their inheritance.1
On the other hand, by addressing legacy planning, planners can give clients peace of mind and prevent family friction and stress. Helping clients through such difficult times can strengthen client loyalty across generations, introduce the planner to new generations of clients, and differentiate the planner’s services from the competition.
The growing trend is that financial planners are seeking to be even more client-centric and collaborative with the services they offer.2 Incorporating legacy planning guidance is the natural, value-driven extension of the critical guidance and support they already provide.
Why Planners Are Uniquely Positioned to Lead
Due to their long-standing, multi-dimensional relationships with clients—as well as their comprehensive understanding of a client’s financial position—financial planners can feel confident addressing legacy planning with their clients and providing tools to make these plans manageable and actionable.
In the ecosystem of advisers, including estate attorneys, funeral homes, life insurance, and retirement communities, there is no other clear adviser to help the client gather the full range of required information and instructions and consolidate it into one tidy “package.” Attorneys and other providers may possess the technical background to address these topics, but financial planners’ ongoing, often decades-long client relationships provide them with the power to provide much-needed direction. Attorneys are episodic, but financial planners and advisers accompany clients through a wide array of life changes over time.
How Planners Can Incorporate Legacy Planning Into Their Businesses
Planners can start to shift from just estate planning to legacy planning by framing conversations more holistically, leading to the capture of new insights and instructions to inform next steps that best serve their clients.
Importantly, the extension to legacy planning does not need to disrupt existing workflows between planners and clients. The planner can introduce it early in the onboarding process with a new client, or later in established relationships. Ideally, planners can revisit it over time, emphasizing it more strongly as the relationship matures.
To provide motivation, the planner could ask, “If something happened to you today, would your loved ones know what to do? If I called them individually right now, would they agree on the answers about what you really want, and could they make it happen?” Once the client sees the importance, they can use checklists or digital legacy planning tools to provide the location of key assets, bill-paying instructions, document locations, and details about funeral and medical plans.
Regardless of the details, getting started is the most crucial step. Planners can become indispensable partners with strategies to maintain strong cross-generational relationships and deliver exceptional value precisely when families need it most.
Of course, for a variety of reasons, it can be difficult to convince clients to take action on legacy planning. To prepare for this, planners can develop strategies to address the common reasons for pushback.
‘I Already Took Care of This’
Many clients feel their job is done after documents are signed and they have updated their list of beneficiaries. To address the emotional side, planners can ask whether loved ones truly understand the motivation behind these decisions. And, from a logistical side, would their families know when and how to pay a utility bill, the location of crucial paperwork to the house or car, or how to communicate with you—the trusted financial planner?
Speaking to both generations can be helpful. As a real-life example, this question was posed to a mother and daughter separately. The mother replied, “I have everything done, my daughter has everything.” But this clashed head-on with the daughter’s answer: “. . . well, she emailed me some stuff a few years ago. But I’m not sure.” In our extensive experience, this is a pattern. The person most familiar with the details assumes their family understands everything too. In reality, the busy family member only has a vague recollection of the discussion.
‘I’ve Been Meaning to Do This’
Frequently, clients say they don’t have time to establish a legacy plan or don’t know where to begin. But in practice, building a useful and thoughtful legacy does not require as much time as they might think. Clients may also use procrastination to mask uncertainty about how to proceed. By providing a tool that supplies a comprehensive list of suggested documentation, planners can gently and competently ease clients into creating their legacy plans.
Many also say they’ll do it when their kids are older or when work slows down. As financial planners know, the perfect moment does not exist. By waiting for it, clients will be waiting forever and have no legacy planned. Plans don’t need to be perfect; an incomplete legacy plan is of better assistance to a family than a non-existent one. Often, once individuals begin their legacy plans, they feel more in control and gain the confidence to provide more information.
‘I Don’t Want to Talk About Death’
Some people feel that talking about death will make it happen. While this is illogical, by pushing too hard, planners risk alienating their clients. With this group, planners can only plant the seed, let their clients go on their own journey, and serve as a continuous pillar of education and support for the day they change their mind. Explain that it is not about dwelling on worst-case scenarios; it’s about making life easier for the people they care about the most.
Death is inevitable, but dying badly is not. As Chris Palmer, author of Achieving a Good Death says, “A ‘good death’ is often the result of earlier conversations and clear plans that reduce fear and allow people to live fully until the end—medically, financially, practically, and relationally.”3
‘It’s Too Early,’ or ‘I’m Healthy’
Another way to postpone the topic is to assume legacy only matters when someone is very old or gravely ill. But this approach ignores a stubborn reality: clients never know what the future will bring, and they need to make the future easy for those they love. A person born today has approximately a 31 percent probability of dying before the age of 70, and often they haven’t left key information in order, or a properly prepared legacy.4
To address these concerns, describe the positive aspects of legacy planning and the significant benefits to their loved ones. Offer educational resources, such as books or podcasts, and check in gently on the topic from time to time.
A Vision for the Future
With your clients’ best interests in mind, create a plan to incorporate legacy planning into your daily practice and offer the best guidance to your clients. Choose a few clients you feel would most benefit from legacy planning and introduce the concept during your next conversation.
As robust tools, apps, and frameworks become more commonplace across the industry, digital innovation is poised to transform the future of legacy planning and move it from a differentiator to an industry standard. Financial planners can stay ahead of the curve by offering more to their clients, demonstrating value in the moments that matter most to families, and strengthening relationships across generations—all while improving client outcomes, building client loyalty, and expanding into new client segments.
Endnotes
- Whitbeck, Anthong. n.d. “Succession Planning for Advisors: A Complete Guide.” Advisor Legacy. https://advisorlegacy.com/blog/succession-planning.
- Financial Planning Association. 2024, September 18. “New Research Reveals Focus on Financial Planning in a Changing Landscape.” www.financialplanningassociation.org/press-room/releases-announcements/2024-financial-planning-landscape-research.
- Palmer, Chris. 2024. Achieving a Good Death: A Practical Guide to the End of Life. Bloomsbury.
- Norheim, Ole F., Angela Y. Chang, Sarah Bolongaita, et al. 2024, December 14. “Halving Premature Death and Improving Quality of Life at All Ages: Cross-Country Analyses of past Trends and Future Directions.” The Lancet 404 (10470): 2,437–2,446. www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(24)02417-6/fulltext.
Sidbar 1
Where Does Traditional Estate Planning Break Down in Real Life?
• Medical directives exist but don’t explain “why,” causing family conflict and stress.
• Loved ones cannot find information on bill payments, resulting in services being cut.
• Families can’t claim benefits they don’t know exist.
• Real estate details are missing, including location, paperwork, ownership, mortgage, and taxes.
• Vehicle details about registration or insurance are absent, delaying transfers or sales.
• Contact information for key advisers is missing, or the relevant authorization is not provided.
Sidebar 2:
A Four-Step Approach to Converting Procrastination to Action
Clients may find it difficult to get started with legacy planning because they don’t have time or may feel a basic estate plan is enough. To help motivate them, highlight what is missing from their current approach. Supply checklists they can use, or offer digital tools. You may also wish to reinforce the negative impact loved ones will face if information is not provided.
Step 1: 30 minutes to get started
Ask the client if they can carve out 30 minutes of uninterrupted time by a specified deadline (end of the week, month, quarter, etc.). Provide a checklist and suggest they record only information they have memorized already—where a retirement account is, the name of the mortgage company, etc. Asking the client to skip anything they haven’t memorized makes it mentally easier to get started.
Step 2: 60 minutes to fill in the gaps
After the momentum from Step 1, clients are often motivated to continue. Suggest the client block one hour to fill in the gaps with easily accessible information such as the lawyer’s phone number, the account number for the electricity bill, etc.
Step 3: Additional information over time
Suggest the client address aspects that require more time, such as adding a beneficiary online, making a short video explaining the reasoning behind decisions, or setting up posthumous access. Frequently, clients feel good and gain momentum after checking these items off. Digital tools can provide guidance, tracking, and motivation.
Step 4: Periodic updates
Encourage the client to revisit the legacy plan annually to review and update information that has changed.