Rachel Pettis

Oct 10, 2024

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What’s New in October – General availability for the Client Portal, Planning Calculators, Estate Builder enhancements, and more!

At Vanilla, we’re constantly innovating to help advisors and planners streamline their estate planning process, and we’re thrilled to share a preview of some powerful new tools coming soon to the Vanilla Estate Advisory Platform. These new features will enhance how you work with clients, improving everything from initial conversations to advanced estate planning. Here’s what’s coming later this month:

• Legacy Planning Calculators for quick, detailed insights
• IDGTs, a new table view, and other enhancements in Vanilla Scenarios™
• The Client Portal available to all Vanilla customers
• My Notes Library in Vanilla Estate Builder™

Provide clients with quick, actionable insights with new Legacy Planning Calculators

Our new Legacy Planning Calculators will help advisors quickly provide clients and prospects with insightful planning information. These calculators will make it easy to have early conversations with prospects or in-depth conversations with clients without having to collect a complete financial picture. No balance sheet data or abstraction will be required, allowing advisors to dive into preliminary discussions and outline potential strategies right away. Regardless of where clients are in the planning process, these new calculators will help advisors move forward quickly and efficiently.

Plan better with IDGTs, customized strategy growth rates, and table views for each strategy in Vanilla Scenarios™

In Vanilla Scenarios, you will soon be able to model the gifting of assets to an Intentionally Defective Grantor Trust (IDGT) to show the potential planning impact of making income tax payments on behalf of the trust. For all strategies in Vanilla Scenarios, the platform will now automatically calculate the net return once you’ve entered a growth rate percentage and income tax as a percentage of the portfolio. With the addition of IDGTs, you can model some of the most popular planning strategies for your clients to help them mitigate future potential estate tax liability.

We have also updated Vanilla Scenarios with the ability to include an individual growth rate for each strategy. Advisors and planners can tailor strategies and their assets to better visualize potential growth over time.

Additionally, we have added new table views to Vanilla Scenarios to better visualize the impact of potential planning. A comprehensive table highlights the potential growth of a client’s estate during their lifetime and compares the overall impact of additional planning against current planning. Individual tables break down the calculations of specific strategies, including growth rate and income tax if applicable, allowing you to highlight the contributions of individual strategies. If a scenario employs multiple strategies, all tables can be compared in one view to optimize potential tax savings.

Collaborate better with clients through the new Client Portal

Last month we announced our new Client Portal to help advisors offer clients a personalized estate planning experience. Next week, the Client Portal will be generally available for all Vanilla customers! To learn more, contact your Customer Success Manager.

Easily save provision notes with My Notes Library for Estate Builder™

Thanks to feedback from Vanilla Estate Builder customers, we’re excited to introduce the My Notes Library adding increased efficiency to the document abstraction process. Planners will be able to craft detailed, customized provisions tailored to each client’s specific needs and save in a personal library for later use. Notes can be saved to the Library when adding a custom note or from Library Management in Settings and easily searched. With the My Notes Library, estate planners will be able to expedite document review and ensure a client’s estate plan clearly articulates their planning intentions.

What’s Next?

These upcoming features are just a glimpse of how we’re continually enhancing the Vanilla Estate Advisory Platform to support advisors and estate planners in delivering the best possible service to their clients. Whether you’re just starting initial conversations or diving into complex, multi-layered planning, Vanilla is here to help you every step of the way.

If you’re eager to learn more or see a demo of these features contact sales.