Vanilla simplifies estate planning in California by helping you organize and visualize every client’s complete financial picture.
Vanilla simplifies estate planning in California by helping you organize and visualize every client’s complete financial picture.
"Vanilla gives us a comprehensive view of our clients' financial picture with their family, financial and estate information, all in one place."
Arielle Lederman
Senior Advisor, AdvicePeriod
California Estate Planning Documents
Advisors invite clients to create estate documents.
Clients go through a self-guided questionnaire.
Clients review and finalize the plan.
Printed documents are shipped for signature.
Advisor keeps track of clients’ progress.
The estate plan is visualized in Vanilla.
Estate-related laws and taxes can vary by state. Here are a few of California’s notable distinctions:
California is one of a handful of states that recognize community property, meaning generally that assets acquired during marriage are considered to be owned equally by both spouses.
Although California does not have a state estate or inheritance tax, California residents may need to consider federal estate tax portability.
California has one of the more expensive and time-consuming probate processes compared to other states, with one of the highest probate fees in the country.
Here’s a summary of how assets transfer when a person dies intestate in California.
Clients answer questions through a step-by-step process that generates their estate planning documents.
Clients can choose multiple options based upon their needs such as a QTIP marital trust or outright distribution to spouse, aged-based trust distributions for assets left to people in trust, and a perpetual pot trust for some or all assets left to children or descendants.
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Invite your clients to create core estate planning documents. Monitor the status of invites sent and your clients’ progress to ensure they’re successfully completed and executed.
Information from the estate documents flows directly into Vanilla so advisors can immediately see the specific fact patterns and integrate their clients’ financial data.
Integrations
Create estate plan overviews
Organize and onboard clients’ plans in one place.
Visualize how the estate plan works
Simplify complex plans with interactive diagrams.
Drive ongoing legacy planning
Create strategies and opportunities through impactful estate planning conversations.
Yes, Vanilla has a suite of core estate planning documents that have been tailored to CA law by top CA-licensed attorneys.
Yes, Vanilla enables advisors to create new estate plans and generate automated visualizations, reports and potential opportunities through Document Builder.
If your company does not have an estate strategist in-house, Vanilla will abstract your clients’ documents and transform them into the key pieces of data that become the Client Profile.
Vanilla abstracts data directly from estate documents submitted by an advisor and enters it into Vanilla to visualize the key aspects of the client(s)’ planning. This includes document names, date of execution, governing law, specifically named parties (beneficiaries, fiduciaries, etc.), planning structure at death of client and spouse (if applicable), key trust provisions, and opportunities for additional planning. Vanilla Abstraction Services do not include abstraction or calculations of unsupported fact patterns, provide legal advice or determinations, offer tax advice or determinations, or make qualitative assessments of the documents.
No, we currently have integrations with Black Diamond, Orion and Addepar so you can pull in your clients’ account information. Additionally, we have a CSV upload so you can pull information from a portfolio management system, financial planning tool, or CRM and upload it to Vanilla.
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