The conversation almost no advisor is having yet

Here is something that happens more than anyone in this industry likes to admit. A client dies. You've managed their money for 15 years. You know their kids' names. And within a year, the surviving spouse is gone too; not because they died, but because they walked away and took the assets to another advisor.

It's not personal. It's not because you did a bad job. It's because somewhere along the way, you were the name on the statements, not the person the family trusted when things became difficult.

Here's the statistic that should stop you cold. Between 70% and 90% of surviving spouses leave their advisor within a year of the client's death. That statistic gets repeated constantly in this industry, and almost nobody has fixed it. The usual advice - invite the spouse to more meetings, check in more often - treats a symptom. It never touches the real cause, which is that the relationship with the surviving family usually isn't real until grief forces it to be, and by then it's too late.

There's a conversation that fixes this at the root, and almost no advisor is having it.

It's funeral preplanning. And before you picture caskets and floral arrangements, stop, because that's not what this is. This is a financial planning conversation with real emotional weight, which happens to be exactly the kind of conversation you already own. Long-term care. Legacy wishes. What happens to the business after a client’s death. You built your practice on having the hard conversations everyone else avoids. This is simply the one you haven't added yet.

Only about one in five funerals in the U.S. are preplanned, according to the National Funeral Directors Association. Sit with that for a second. Four out of every five families you'll ever serve are going to walk into a funeral home for the first time on the worst day of their lives, unprepared, overwhelmed, making decisions they've never made before, under pressure. It's not because they don't care. Research from The Foresight Companies' Funeral and Cemetery Consumer Behavior Study found that 46% of consumers now say they'd rather handle funeral arrangements virtually than sit across from someone at a funeral home; this is up from 34% before the pandemic. People don't want the traditional experience. Nobody has offered them anything else.

Here's the part that should really get your attention. That same research found the single biggest education gap in the entire funeral profession is preplanning itself. Funeral professionals believe they're communicating this well. Consumers say they're barely hearing it at all. That gap is sitting wide open right now, and you are exactly the person who can walk through it.

Why you? Because you're already in the room. You're already having the retirement income conversation, the legacy conversation, the “what happens when I'm gone?” conversation. Adding preplanning to that conversation isn't a stretch. It's the piece that makes everything else you've built hold together when it matters most.

When a parent dies without a plan

There's a human reason to care here too, and it matters as much as the business case. When a parent dies without a plan, it's the surviving spouse or the adult children who spend hours in a funeral home, grieving, sleep-deprived, making decisions they've never made before, at the exact moment they're least equipped to think clearly. If you've ever wondered what it really means to protect a family, this is it. Not just their money. Their hardest week.

The technology that once made this hard to offer directly isn't a barrier anymore. Point-of-sale software now lets a licensed professional guide a client through the entire preplanning process, from selecting arrangements to submitting the insurance application, in about 40 minutes. Shorter than most client reviews. It fits inside a meeting you're already having. Confirm the licensing requirements in your state, but the operational excuse that once existed is gone.

So picture it. You bring this conversation into your practice. You become the advisor who protects families from more than market volatility, the one who thought ahead about the day nobody wants to think about. The relationship with the surviving spouse isn't built in a rushed meeting during probate. It's already there, because you were there years earlier, when it mattered.

Right now, almost nobody in financial services is having this conversation. That means the advisors who start now aren't just adding a service. They're building trust their competitors can't copy, because it was earned long before anyone tested it.

The clients who need this most will never bring it up themselves. They're waiting for someone they trust to make it easy. That's you. The only question is whether you start now, while this is still rare, or wait until everyone else figures out what you already know.

 

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