Vanilla Blog

Sarah D. McDaniel, CFA

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Apr 10, 2025

For advisors, staying on top of financial markets and structural developments to identify opportunities for your clients and prospects—and then guiding them through implementation—is essential for success. When markets are turbulent, it’s a smart time to revisit estate planning. While the instinct might be to pause and wait for stability, volatile periods can actually open up strategic opportunities. Using the blog The Building Blocks of Estate Planning Techniques as a guide, we’ll outline some timely actions advisors can take to calmly and confidently help clients at different wealth stages navigate periods of uncertainty.  For a deeper dive, download the complete...

Vanilla

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Apr 09, 2025

Vanilla Recognized in Product Innovation and Outstanding Contribution categories; Chairman Steve Lockshin a Finalist for Outstanding Individual Contribution Salt Lake City, UT – April 7, 2025 – Vanilla, the leading platform in modern estate planning, has been selected as a finalist for the Twelfth Annual Family Wealth Report Awards 2025 program in the following categories: Product Innovation (B2B) Outstanding Contribution to Wealth Management Thought Leadership (Company) Outstanding Contribution to Wealth Management Thought Leadership (Individual) – Steve Lockshin Through a rigorous and independent judging process, the annual Family Wealth Report Awards program honors the most innovative and exceptional firms, teams and...

Vanilla

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Apr 08, 2025

Vanilla recently announced our integration with eMoney, empowering financial advisors to streamline their estate planning workflows like never before. Matter Family Office, a nationally recognized advisory firm managing approximately $3.5 billion in assets, is already leveraging this integration to enhance efficiency, improve client engagement, and scale the impact of estate planning across their client base. The Power of Integration A truly comprehensive approach to estate planning is not complete without visibility into the client’s balance sheet. For many advisory teams, this data already exists in eMoney. Until now, this gap has led to inefficient workarounds to get eMoney data into...

Vanilla

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Apr 07, 2025

The 2024 Financial Financial Planner Productivity Study from Kitces, How Financial Planners Actually Do Financial Planning, collects data on the key drivers of team productivity for advisory firms.  This data is crucial for firm success as clients continuously expect more from their relationships with their advisors, and advisors are faced with finding ways to meet these evolving needs without adding hours to their day or increasing overhead costs.  Importantly, this survey reflects how real advisors operate in their practices day to day—shedding light on the tools they use, how they approach certain processes, their client interactions, and more. This sets...

Vanilla

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Apr 04, 2025

Gifting to your children is an excellent way to reduce estate tax liabilities, but sometimes it makes more sense to give directly to grandchildren, rather than to your children. Because these gifts “skip” a generation, they are referred to as generation-skipping transfers (GST) and have special tax treatment. There are a few important things to keep in mind when considering a generation-skipping transfer gift, including the generation-skipping transfer tax. We’ll break the tax down for you and give you a few more important pointers to pay attention to. What is the generation-skipping transfer tax? The generation-skipping transfer tax (or “GSTT”)...

Jessica Lantz

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Mar 26, 2025

At Vanilla, we're excited to share our March lineup of powerful new features designed to enhance your estate planning workflows and provide deeper insights for you and your clients. Here's what's new this month: Unlock integrated Estate Summaries and onboard clients in minutes with V/AI Summarizing documents individually adds value. But synthesizing them into a single, integrated estate view within minutes sets a new standard for what’s possible in estate planning. With the launch of V/AI Estate Summaries and our expanded V/AI Automatic Profiles, you are able to: Upload multiple estate plan documents to unlock a high-level overview of your...

Vanilla

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Mar 04, 2025

Tax planning for clients with taxable estates has always been complex. We’ve learned the best way to explain estate planning strategies is with diagrams, not documents. That’s why we’ve put together this deck of 10 diagrams to explain some of the advanced strategies and why household with $10M in assets should care about estate tax. Why $10M in household assets? In 2026 the Estate Tax exemption drops down to just about $10M (or higher based on inflation). The 10 diagrams explain both why you need advanced strategies and how 8 different strategies work. We’ve explained them all below but if...

Jessica Lantz

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Feb 28, 2025

February brings exciting enhancements to the Vanilla platform, with new features designed to support advanced planning techniques and make document creation easier than ever. Here's what you can expect: Make starting the estate conversation easier than ever  The latest evolution of Estate Health Check arrives with an improved advisor landing page to help enable clients and prospects access Estate Health Check more easily. This comprehensive update revolutionizes how advisors engage with prospects and clients and identify planning opportunities, featuring: Facilitate conversations with personalized discussion topics based on client inputs Branded public links for seamless prospect and client outreach An enhanced...

Vanilla

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Feb 26, 2025

Joe Abbott joins as Chief Marketing Officer and Hanna Grokenberger Byers named Chief of Staff and VP of Operations as the Vanilla platform surpasses 15,000 client estates Vanilla, the leading platform in modern estate planning, today announced the appointment of Joe Abbott as Chief Marketing Officer and Hanna Grokenberger Byers as Chief of Staff and Vice President of Operations. This comes just weeks after the company ended its fiscal year with 293% year-over-year platform growth and the release of V/AI Copilot, the first AI agent for estate advisory. In the last year, Vanilla has cemented its position as category leader...

Jessica Lantz

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Feb 24, 2025

As we gear up for our first product release in the new fiscal year, we’re reflecting on 2024 and the remarkable achievements and transformative features that have shaped estate planning for advisors and their clients.  Here are some high points: Platform adoption skyrocketed 300% 16,000+ estates and $250B in assets were modeled with Vanilla 80+ new features were shipped to make estate planning easier than ever Let’s dive into our top product releases of 2024. Accelerate onboarding and planning with the power of AI Delivering time savings and facilitating client  conversations with AI was a big focus in 2024. We...

Madison Eubanks

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Feb 21, 2025

Going to the dentist, getting an oil change, getting a flu shot, cleaning out the gutters, taking your pet to its annual vet appointment—these aren’t things that most people look forward to doing, but they’re all regular maintenance tasks that we do throughout the year.  And while no one wants to add yet another item to life’s list of chores, estate planning updates deserve a place on the docket. This doesn’t need to be done every year, but ongoing maintenance is crucial for an optimized plan.  In this article, we’ll discuss why updating an estate plan is important, how often...

Madison Eubanks

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Feb 21, 2025

Intestacy, or dying intestate, is legalese for when a person passes away without a will. When a person dies “intestate,” their estate is subject to the intestacy laws of the state they lived in. This means that who inherits the estate is left up to the government as defined by the state’s intestacy laws, rather than by the deceased person’s choice. This can give rise to any number of issues and can create headaches for the intestate person’s family and loved ones. The purposes of wills and trusts are, of course, to communicate one’s wishes for what should happen to...