Bridging the Gap: How to Integrate Estate Planning Into Your Advisory Practice

He also reveals his firm’s fee pricing model with a tiered menu of services that eliminates arbitrary fees. Jesse then walks through a live Estate Lab case study, a single client with $12.5M in net worth and nearly $6M in estate tax exposure, showing how an ILIT and a QPRT reduce the total estate tax to $2.8M in under five minutes. Includes practical guidance on pricing one-off trust reviews and handling clients who aren’t in your standard planning process.

What You’ll Learn

• How to structure an annual meeting cycle that incorporates estate planning — Jesse’s traffic pattern model with spring meetings for estate and insurance, fall meetings for tax planning, and off-seasons for investment-only clients
• A practical fee pricing model for planning services — Jesse’s tiered menu of services (basic, intermediate, extensive) with a valuation system that eliminates arbitrary fee-setting across multiple advisors
• Live Estate Lab case study: $12.5M single client with $6M in estate tax — how an ILIT and a QPRT reduced total estate tax from nearly $6M to $2.8M in under five minutes
• How to handle one-off estate planning clients — pricing a $500 trust review for a referral who isn’t in your standard planning process, and generating recommendations from a single engagement
• Why estate planning matters even with a $15M federal exemption — state estate taxes, the risk of future exemption reductions, and planning opportunities that exist regardless of net worth
• How to position yourself as the centre of influence with attorneys — building strategies in the Estate Lab, presenting them to the attorney for validation, and generating referrals back
• A real client story: Hawaii widower with ILIT and QCD strategies — how estate document review plus tax planning reduced a client’s effective bracket from 22% to 13–14%

Chapters

Click a timestamp to jump to that section of the webinar.

1. 0:02 — Welcome & Series Context — You Don’t Need Every Episode to Get Value
2. 2:36 — The Two Enemies: Cost of Attorneys & Ever-Changing Estate Law
3. 3:35 — Re-Centring: Financial Success Is a Soft Skill
4. 4:25 — Why Estate Planning Matters Now — Even with a $15M Exemption
5. 6:26 — The Services Gap Revisited — 96% Want It, 10–22% Receive It
6. 7:55 — The Traffic Pattern Model — Structuring Your Annual Meeting Cycle
7. 10:04 — Spring Meetings: Estate & Insurance Reviews
8. 12:30 — Fall Meetings: Tax Planning, Social Security & CPA Collaboration
9. 13:55 — Off-Season Strategy: Investment Clients & Staff Time Management
10. 15:33 — The Fee Pricing Model — Menu of Services & Valuation System
11. 19:40 — One-Off Clients — Charging $500 for a Trust Review
12. 20:35 — Case Study: John Adamson — $12.5M Single Client with Estate Tax Exposure
13. 23:17 — Live Estate Lab Demo — Base Facts, ILIT & QPRT Strategies
14. 27:36 — Results: $6M Tax Reduced to $2.8M — Zero State Estate Tax
15. 29:54 — What’s Next: Upcoming FP Alpha Features
16. 31:28 — One-Off Clients Revisited: The Missouri Brother Story
17. 33:49 — Real Client: Hawaii Widower — ILIT + QCD Drops Bracket from 22% to 13%
18. 35:52 — Closing: Embrace the Why-Not-Me Mentality
19. 36:53 — Q&A & Series Preview — Part 3 in Late October

Key Takeaways

The Traffic Pattern Model Makes Estate Planning Systematic, Not Ad-Hoc

Jesse’s most practical contribution in this session was his meeting cycle structure. His firm runs two formal client meetings per year: spring (estate planning and insurance reviews) and fall (tax planning, Social Security analysis, and CPA collaboration). The process starts 4–6 weeks before the spring meeting with document requests — trusts, medical directives, and insurance policies are uploaded to FP Alpha for snapshots. After the spring meeting, there may be a family meeting to involve beneficiaries, followed by an attorney meeting if documents need updating. The fall meeting produces a tax review, and any Roth conversion or charitable strategies are reviewed with the CPA. Off-seasons (summer and winter) are reserved for investment-only clients and legacy relationships. The key insight: the process doesn’t change based on account size. A $500K client gets the same structure as a $17M client.

A Tiered Menu of Services Eliminates Arbitrary Fee-Setting

Jesse shared his firm’s fee pricing model in detail. They maintain a menu of services with three tiers (basic, intermediate, extensive) that reflects the scope of planning a client needs. Each service has a point valuation, and a client’s total points are calculated based on their needs and net worth using a dropdown system. The quarterly fee is generated from this calculation — in his example, about $317 per quarter, which they round down to $300. The fee is reviewed annually as needs change (marriage, divorce, new assets). The critical benefit: every advisor on the team arrives at the same fee for the same client, which eliminates the uncomfortable subjectivity that many advisors feel when setting planning fees. Jesse recommends starting with a model week to understand what your time is worth, then building the menu from there.

The John Adamson Case Study Shows the Power of Five Minutes in the Estate Lab

Jesse walked through a live case study of a single client (John Adamson) with $12.5M in net worth, no spouse, no children, and siblings as beneficiaries. At baseline, John faced nearly $6M in combined federal and state estate taxes ($4.4M federal, $1.5M New York state). In under five minutes, Jesse modelled two strategies in the Estate Lab: an irrevocable life insurance trust (ILIT) to remove a $3M death benefit and $650K cash value from the estate, and a qualified personal residence trust (QPRT) to transfer John’s $2M New York house out of the estate at its current value. The result: federal estate tax dropped to $2.8M and New York state estate tax dropped to zero — because the house (the primary state-taxable asset) was no longer in the estate. Jesse also noted the beneficiary planning opportunity: since one sibling is a high earner and the other isn’t, splitting assets by tax bracket (more pre-tax assets to the lower-bracket sibling) adds further value.

Estate Planning Is Not Just for High-Net-Worth Clients

Jesse pushed back strongly against the idea that a $15M per-person federal exemption eliminates the need for estate planning. His argument has three layers. First, state estate taxes still apply and have much lower thresholds — John Adamson owed $1.5M to New York alone despite being under the federal exemption. Second, the current high exemption is not guaranteed to last; Social Security Trust Fund deficits and other fiscal pressures make a future reduction likely. Third, and most importantly, estate planning is not just about tax. It’s about family dynamics (an adult child who won’t work), creditor protection (an inherited IRA that lost Supreme Court protection), beneficiary optimisation (different tax brackets for different heirs), and simply making sure documents reflect the client’s current wishes. Jesse’s standard: even at a $28M couple exemption, there is always planning to be done.

Combining Estate and Tax Planning Multiplies the Value

Jesse closed with a real client story that demonstrated the compound effect of using both estate and tax tools together. A widowed client in Hawaii inherited a significant pre-tax IRA and had a life insurance policy pushing his estate over the exemption threshold. The estate snapshot identified the need for an ILIT (removing the death benefit from the estate). The fall tax review then found that qualified charitable distributions and donor-advised fund strategies could reduce his effective tax bracket from 22% down to approximately 13–14%. Neither insight alone would have been as powerful as both together. Jesse’s point: the estate snapshot feeds the tax conversation, and the tax analysis reinforces the estate planning urgency. Using FP Alpha for both creates a virtuous cycle of value.

Jesse’s Annual Meeting Cycle

Tips & Best Practices from Jesse Studeven