Estate planning and trust strategies provide huge benefits to clients, but financial advisors can only maximize their value if they understand the bigger factors surrounding them.
The historical and often personal experiences of African Americans with wealth and finance offer advisors — and other wealth, tax and estate-planning professionals — an important example of why it's essential to ask deep questions and fully understand a client's perspective before bringing up trust vehicles or official documents, two lawyers and a financial planner said.
That requires careful listening and a grasp of how emotions like fear and a lack of trust in financial systems tie into people's relationship to money, according to a new series of papers and webinars on African American estate planning.
And those lessons apply to clients of every racial background or income level. The focus on "sales, sales, sales — not relationships," at the firm where Bryan Beamer, the founder of Winter Haven, Florida-based registered investment advisory firm iPlan, started his career reflects a wider problem across an industry with tense business pressures on rookie financial advisors.
"My industry has done a horrible job in terms of trying to connect with the client. They connect with the money well. They do a great job of connecting with the money, but we've done a horrible job in connecting with the client, with the family, with the legacy, with the education of that," Beamer said in
But that calls for practitioners to reject some traditional norms of the business, according to Jermal Seward, a former Wells Fargo Advisors practice management consultant who is now CEO of Family and Workforce Centers of America, a St. Louis-based company that trains young people and adults in a variety of fields and connects them to potential employers.
"You should not run a transactional-based practice. It needs to be relationship-based. Having a relationship-based approach to how you manage and run your business looks different than the traditional, 'Do they fog a mirror? I'm signing them up. What are they doing for me?'" Seward said. "If you do some of these simple things, it unlocks a lot of the information. It unlocks the opportunity for insight into the individual, no matter their color, right? But particularly if we're talking about African Americans, it gives you an opportunity for you to see them, for them to see you as not just coming after their money, but truly trying to understand their situation and their circumstances."
Getting to 'the human' involved with the planning
With that goal and helping more advisors and other professionals reach it in mind, Seward, Beamer and Martin Shenkman, a partner with law firm Shenkman Tietz who advises high net worth families and other clients on taxes and estate planning, are leading a collaboration across several journal articles and webinars about working with Black clients. After holding the first live session this month, the trio have more webinars planned for the future.
The typical industry emphasis on "taxes and technicalities" over the "human aspects of planning" has led Shenkman to study topics around the intersection of estates with religions such as the Baha'i faith and among Mormons, as well as clients with Hispanic heritage, he said.
"I enjoy a conversation about the generation-skipping transfer tax as much as the next tax nerd, but the reality is, if the planning doesn't work for the human beings involved, it's not going to work," Shenkman said. "I think it's a struggle every time I've written about a different faith or culture than what I know — it really is difficult. It's a challenge to try to understand from somebody else's perspective what their thoughts in life are about when you haven't lived it, and that's really kind of what gave rise to this."
The fruits of that collaboration began this summer, with the July 2026 publication in Estate Planning, a Thomson Reuters journal, of "Bridging the Gap: Estate Planning for African Americans," by Beamer, Seward and Shenkman, along with co-authors Latanya Greer, the founder of estate planning firm LSG Legal, and Mark Fowler, CEO of a nonprofit organization called Tanenbaum that provides training and education promoting religious tolerance across every faith.
The article includes case studies on estate planning, covering strategies for heirs property problems, legacy and dynasty trusts, donor-advised funds, charitable endowments, ethical wills and "precatory" language that provide flexibility to administrators and family members while making benefactors' wishes clear. It also cites data on the large wealth disparities between Black and white Americans in homeownership, net worth and inheritance, along with estimates of the hundreds of millions of acres of public land that laws opened to one group's ancestors while largely closing off to the others'. In light of that history, it's no wonder many prospective clients distrust financial institutions and connect money to trauma.
"Fortunately, to more effectively serve African American families, it is not necessary to become a history expert," the authors write. "Awareness, acknowledgment, and a willingness to listen and ask thoughtful, probing questions can help to build trust between African American clients and begin to ameliorate the trust gap."
And, going further, a stronger understanding of that across the industry will boost the number of Black clients it serves.
"Whether or not individual advisers seek this broader societal goal, the stepping stones of creating estate and financial plans for African American families, can, one by one, make a broader impact on improving wealth transmission, the creation of legacies, and improve the long-term wealth impact on African Americans as a whole," the authors wrote. "That will help mitigate the significant wealth and planning disparities between African American families and other American families. Success may be the result of many small steps, repeated on a regular basis."
5 questions to help advisors go deeper
In a separate article, Beamer, Seward and Shenkman shared five questions that "often reveal client goals and planning opportunities that technical questionnaires never uncover." The article, based on their initial webinar, will be published by Leimberg Information Services, a training and educational resource for financial professionals with high net worth customers.
The questions are:
- What does legacy mean to you?
- What opportunities do you want your children to have?
- What concerns you most about the future?
- What family values should be preserved?
- What lessons do you want future generations to learn?
None of the recommended questions require advisors to act as ersatz history or culture scholars or adopt any particular political viewpoint. But estate planning professionals, including advisors, "are uniquely positioned to help clients see planning not as a tool reserved for the wealthy, but as a framework for protecting family, legacy and preserving opportunity," the three authors wrote. Regardless of race or wealth level, any clients may otherwise balk at any discussions of trusts in their estate plans.
"Many advisors will recognize from their own practices that some individuals hear the word 'trust' and immediately assume it is intended for people far wealthier than they are (no matter how wealthy that particular client might be)," Beamer, Seward and Shenkman wrote. "Yet even a family with a modest home, retirement account, insurance policy, or small business may benefit enormously from thoughtful planning, including using trusts. A trust may be the ideal tool to build and transmit generational wealth and the legacy values the client desires. But that same client may have an initial reaction that they are not wealthy enough to warrant trust planning. That reaction may not be based on the level of wealth the client has, which may be substantial, but rather based on the client's feelings based on historic narratives and other factors."
An open door to a wider range of topics
Those factors, in turn, explain why supposedly non-financial issues affect so many clients' portfolios. Examples the three experts discussed during the webinar include an interstate running through the middle of what was once "Black Wall Street" in Tulsa, Oklahoma, the infamous "Delmar Divide" in St. Louis between predominantly white and Black neighborhoods or the difference in electricity prices on either side of the railroad tracks in Franklin, Virginia. And, although there is no monolithic African American experience across tens of millions of people, advisors and other estate planning professionals must realize that people make those links, Shenkman said.
"Any advisor that's advising an African American client, no matter how wealthy they are, everything you've talked about still remains in their mind, and it still can affect how they view whatever planning or steps that they're being recommended to take," Shenkman said. "So it can't be done in a vacuum, just because the client's very wealthy."
Advisors may never convert that prospective customer into a client, though, without developing their skills in behavioral finance to the point that they give people space to discuss those topics.
"Don't look at a client just as, what are they bringing to the table for your benefit," Beamer said. "Look at the client in terms of, OK, what can I do to make sure that I understand your true concerns, and then how can I help educate not just you, but all of the parties that are tied to your wealth, to your success?"
