Category: What’s New

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...

Rachel Pettis

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Dec 04, 2023

If there’s one thing we all agree on here at Vanilla it’s that estate planning matters, a lot. But not every client understands just how important estate planning is. Proper estate planning ensures the preservation of wealth – and its intended purpose for clients and their families. The best planning keeps a client’s family secure, both while they’re alive and long after, whereas improper or lack of planning may expose a client to lengthy legal proceedings, unnecessary taxes, probate fees, and more.  We know from advisors that clients need ongoing education to make the most informed decisions for their estate...

Amjad Hussain

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Oct 19, 2023

When we launched the Vanilla Estate Advisory Platform just over a year ago, we did so because we saw a problem without a solution. There was a deep need for a tool that enabled wealth advisors to help clients with their estate strategy as part of their holistic financial planning. Over the past year, our customers have not only used the Vanilla platform to grow their business and bring value to clients – they have helped us grow, too. We have worked hand in hand with our customers, from small RIAs to the largest enterprise firms to innovate and bring...

Vanilla

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Oct 19, 2023

Updated 10/19/23 Wealth advisors can now give clients a modern estate planning experience–starting with document creation, to estate plan visualizations and ongoing advisory At Vanilla, we believe it’s every wealth advisor's job to ensure that their clients have an estate plan that matches their values and goals. The foundation of a plan is its document, but more often than not, clients have out-of-date estate planning documents or none at all. In fact, according to Vanilla’s State of Estate Planning, 23% of clients with more than $1 million in assets do not have basic estate documents. The consequences of dying intestate,...