Vanilla Blog

Jessica Lantz

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Oct 28, 2026

October is Estate Planning Awareness Month, and this release covers every stage of a plan, from the first conversation with a client to the day their documents are signed. Here’s what we’ve been working on to help you guide clients through the planning process, from start to finish.  Faster to the moments that matter Turn answers into opportunities with an enhanced Estate Health Check™ The challenge: Without a simple, low-pressure conversation starter, many estate planning discussions never happen. The solution: Send a personalized link that clients and prospects complete on their phone in a few minutes, giving you a clear...

Vanilla

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Oct 28, 2026

A practical agenda and follow-up workflow to align spouses, executors, and heirs before the plan has to work. A client’s daughter calls on a Monday morning. Her mother, a widow, was admitted to the hospital over the weekend, and the staff is asking who can make medical decisions for her. Years ago, her mother told her that if anything ever happened, she should call you. The daughter doesn’t know whether her mother has a healthcare directive, where it would be, or whether she is the person named to decide. You reviewed her mother’s documents last spring, and they were current....

Vanilla

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Oct 21, 2026

A client tells you their estate plan is in good shape. They signed a revocable trust with a respected attorney a few years back. During a routine review, you pull up their 401(k) statement and find the beneficiary section empty, because their employer switched recordkeepers and the old designation never made the move. Across many client estate plans, the same issues show up again and again. Many of the most common estate planning mistakes start like this one. Problems build after signing, as accounts change hands, amendments pile up, and rules shift around a plan nobody has reread. Part 1...

Vanilla

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Oct 13, 2026

How to bring up estate planning, uncover gaps quickly, and turn a tough topic into clear next steps. The agenda for the annual review has a line for estate planning. The portfolio discussion runs long, the client has somewhere to be, and the line moves to next time. Then it moves again. Estate planning conversations often stall this way, one rescheduled agenda item at a time. In Part 1 of our National Estate Planning Awareness Month series, we covered what no estate plan or an outdated one costs clients and your firm. This post covers the next step: how to...

Vanilla

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Oct 09, 2026

Bellevue, WA, October 9, 2026. Vanilla, the modern estate planning platform built for financial advisors, today announced it has been named Technology/Solutions Provider of the Year in the Emerging Technologies category at the 2026 MMI/Barron’s Industry Awards. Now in their 18th year, the awards recognize firms making strides in innovation and leadership in the investment advisory solutions industry. The Emerging Technologies category honors technology and service providers with early-stage or niche innovations that show strong potential to impact the industry, and winners are chosen by a vote of representatives from MMI member firms. The recognition follows Vanilla’s wins in the...

Jessica Lantz

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Oct 09, 2026

For many advisors, the hardest part of estate planning is getting the first conversation going. Without a simple way in, plenty of plans stall before they ever begin. National Estate Planning Awareness Month is underway, which makes right now a natural moment to start thinking about your strategy for approaching these conversations.  This is exactly why Estate Health Check is getting a major enhancement. It’s been redesigned to get those planning conversations off the ground, and to make it easy to take action on any planning gaps. First impression Here's how it works: you send a personalized link, your client...

Vanilla

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Oct 07, 2026

No estate plan and outdated plans both create preventable chaos, taxes, and transfer risk. The call comes on a Tuesday morning. A client you've served for 14 years has died, and his wife is on the line before she's phoned anyone else. You know the household's accounts, risk tolerance, and every grandchild's name. What you don't know is where the will is, because the file doesn't have one. Or it does have one: a trust drafted in 2009, in a different state, naming a trustee who retired years ago, for a household whose largest brokerage account was never retitled into...

Vanilla

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Oct 07, 2026

Brentmark's review spans federal estate and GST tax, every U.S. jurisdiction with a state estate or inheritance tax, and advanced planning strategies. BELLEVUE, Washington — Oct. 7, 2026 — Vanilla, a leading estate planning platform for wealth management firms, today announced that its calculation engine has been independently validated by Brentmark, a trusted specialist in estate and tax planning serving advisors and attorneys for more than 40 years. Vanilla is the first estate planning platform to undergo this level of third-party scrutiny, with a review spanning federal estate and GST tax, all 13 U.S. jurisdictions with a state estate tax,...

Vanilla

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Oct 01, 2026

New offering connects clients with a nationwide network of 140,000+ credentialed notaries who come to them BELLEVUE, Washington, October 1, 2026: Vanilla, the modern estate planning platform built for financial advisors, today announced the launch of Mobile Notary, a new offering powered by Snapdocs, the leading technology platform for notary and signing workflows across regulated industries. Vanilla’s Mobile Notary brings a vetted, background-checked notary directly to advisors' clients, at a time and location of the client's choosing. It is available now to all Vanilla clients with a finalized plan, accessible directly from their Vanilla dashboard. An estate plan only protects...

A finalized estate plan isn't a done deal. Until it's signed, witnessed, and notarized, it's still a draft, and getting there is often where things stall. Coordinating notary appointments around bank hours, or a trip to a retail store, is a friction point that can sit between "finalized" and "funded" for weeks. Vanilla has partnered with Snapdocs to close that gap. Mobile Notary gives Vanilla advisors' clients access to a nationwide network of 140,000+ credentialed, background-checked notaries, available in all 50 states with support for more than 70 languages, who come to the client instead of the other way around....

Jessica Lantz

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Sep 30, 2026

With Estate Planning Awareness Month just around the corner, now is a natural time to bring estate planning into more client conversations. September's releases help you get there faster, starting with a new way to build balance sheets using AI.  AI that elevates you Use AI to build a balance sheet in Vanilla The challenge: Data entry is one of the most time-consuming parts of getting a new client plan underway, and one of the least valuable places for you to spend your time.  The solution: Upload a PDF of your client's financials, and Magic Balance Sheet (powered by VAI®)...

Jessica Lantz

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Sep 23, 2026

Data entry is one of the most time-consuming parts of getting a new client plan underway, and one of the least valuable places for you to spend your time. Every hour spent transcribing information is an hour not spent on strategy. We're tackling this problem by introducing the Magic Balance Sheet, powered by VAI® - a new way to turn a client's financials into a fully populated balance sheet without requiring manual data entry. From PDF to populated in minutes [embed]https://justvanilla.wistia.com/medias/bm8h3yn42a?embedType=web_component&seo=true&videoWidth=640[/embed] The Magic Balance Sheet turns what has historically been one of the slowest parts of onboarding into a streamlined...