Category: What’s New

As summer heats up, so do the new features at Vanilla. This month, we’re excited to introduce several enhancements designed to streamline your estate planning processes and provide even greater value to your clients. Here’s a quick summary of what's new: V/AI for Estate Builder improvements: Estate Builder users now get automatic document summaries and can automatically import text into the client profile. Generation Skipping Transfer Tax - Direct skip calculations: We’ve expanded the power of our platform to support GSTT calculations for direct skips so that each client profile reflects comprehensive tax analysis. Additional distribution customizations: Now you can...

Rachel Pettis

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Jun 18, 2024

Summer’s here and new features at Vanilla are hotter than New York City asphalt. This month we’re excited about: Executive Summary and an enhanced Estate Diagram for the Vanilla platform and PDF report Vanilla Essentials: key documents for your client’s loved ones Generation Skipping Transfer Tax available in Vanilla Estate Builder, Estate Diagram, and more ILITs now available as a modeling strategy in Vanilla Scenarios New fields present in Estate Builder powered by VAI for advanced trusts Give clients a personalized snapshot of their estate with Executive Summary Thanks to feedback from Vanilla customers, we have added an Executive Summary...

As we embrace the vibrant spring season, Vanilla is excited to unveil even more new features and enhancements designed to simplify complex processes, provide intuitive planning tools, and foster deeper advisor-client conversations: Get estate planning answers fast with the full launch of VAI Chat, now generally available. VAI chat offers immediate AI-driven answers and insights, enabling users to efficiently navigate the complexities of estate planning. Streamline client assessments with the Estate Health Check, a quick and effective way for advisors to gather critical insights about a client's current estate situation without the need for exhaustive document reviews. Optimize wealth transfer...

Rachel Pettis

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Apr 16, 2024

Spring (and Legacy Now) is in the air! April is showering Vanilla with multiple new features, enabling our customers to: Expedite document reviews in Vanilla Estate Builder with smart suggestions powered by VAI™ and additional customization with Advanced Distributions Show the potential future impact of layering on a SLAT or GRAT with Vanilla Scenarios™ Invite clients to engage an estate attorney in certain states when completing their documents with Vanilla Document Builder Include the cost of Vanilla Document Builder in your firm’s fee structure with a Charge Me option Add your firm’s custom compliance disclosures to the Vanilla PDF report...

Rachel Pettis

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Mar 19, 2024

March feature madness is in full swing here at Vanilla with new releases and an exciting launch last week! Here's what we're most excited about this month: Introducing Vanilla Scenarios™ An upgraded client Estate Profile Model the future impact of planning with Vanilla Scenarios™ Currently in the Vanilla platform, advisors, planners, and attorneys can use our recently enhanced projections feature to visualize a client’s current estate at a future point in time, like the 2026 Sunset. With Vanilla Scenarios™, rolling out over the coming months, wealth advisors will be able to model the future impact of advanced planning on top...

John Costello

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Mar 12, 2024

Vanilla Scenarios provides advisors and estate strategists with powerful planning tools to identify planning gaps, visualize future projections, and optimize plans for maximum impact. Vanilla, a leading provider of innovative estate planning software, today announced the availability of Vanilla Scenarios™, a powerful new tool designed to optimize clients' estate plans for the future. Vanilla Scenarios modernizes estate planning by providing advisors, wealth planners, and estate lawyers with unparalleled capabilities to model multiple planning scenarios dynamically and in real-time.  Advisors can effortlessly layer multiple strategies onto existing plans and customize the details of each strategy, including changes to their client’s state...

Rachel Pettis

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Feb 12, 2024

February is a short month, but that doesn’t mean we’re short on new features. The Vanilla team has been working hard and are excited to bring three high-impact new features in February: Enhanced Projections Collaborative Onboarding Auto-calculations for Charitable Gifts Let's dive in. Visualize the future value of an estate with the new Projections Wealth advisors play a crucial role in helping their clients understand the full picture of their wealth both today and in the future. Generalized financial planning tools are helpful for understanding how assets grow and fall over time. But they fall short when it comes to...

John Costello

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Jan 23, 2024

New AI assistant VAI Chat helps advisors with estate planning concepts; streamlined document creation gives clients a modern estate planning experience Vanilla, a leading provider of innovative estate planning software, today announced new additions to its platform, including VAI Chat, Collaborative Onboarding, and the expanded availability of Vanilla Document Builder™. VAI Chat is an AI-powered assistant designed to simplify the estate planning experience for wealth planners, advisors, and their clients. Currently in beta, VAI Chat offers an intuitive chat experience in the Vanilla platform, answering practical estate planning questions sourced from a curated corpus of estate planning content. Its capabilities...

Rachel Pettis

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Dec 29, 2023

Welcome to 2024! It's a new year which means higher inflation-adjusted exemptions. Accordingly, we have updated the Vanilla Estate Advisory Platform with the newest inflation-adjusted estate planning figures recently released by the IRS. This will enable advisors to accurately project the growth of clients’ estates and strategize on trust structures, gifting, tax mitigation and more. Source: IRS.gov Federal Estate Tax Exemption The federal estate tax exemption has increased from $12.92M to $13.61M per individual (or $27.22M per married couple). For advisors whose clients have taxable estates, it’s important to note that estate tax exemptions are “unified”. This means that if...