How to price trust funding as a service

How much should you charge a household to fund their trust? Most advisors who run the work absorb it into the AUM fee and never invoice for it separately. The accounting works on its own terms. The retention math runs against it. A family that pays nothing identifiable for trust funding remembers nothing identifiable about it. The wealth-transfer payoff (the children call you when the parents die because they remember your name) only arrives when the household experienced the work as something the firm did deliberately, not something that happened in the background of a 1.0 percent annual fee. Pricing is the signal. This piece is the four-mode pricing ladder for trust funding as a service, the math on each, and the hybrid model most RIAs and solo planners should land on.

The pricing question hiding inside the funding ceremony

Our previous piece argued that the funding ceremony is the wealth-transfer-introduction moment: skip it and the firm loses the household at the first-generation event. That made the case for why the work matters. It did not answer how the work gets paid for.

The pricing question is consequential. The funding ceremony adds 60 to 90 minutes per household at engagement, plus four 90-day touchpoints, plus ongoing maintenance as life events trigger re-funding.

• Day 30. Status check on every letter mailed.
• Day 45. Rejection assist, when the first institutional rejections land.
• Day 75. Proof review against the asset inventory.
• Day 90. Written close-out naming anything still open.

That cadence is the difference between a packet going out and a trust getting funded.

For a 100-household practice that is several hundred billable hours a year, either absorbed into the existing fee or invoiced separately. Most practices have never made the choice deliberately.

The macro stakes are large. Cerulli puts wealth transfers through 2048 at $124 trillion, $105 trillion of it to heirs, against a first-generation breakage rate commonly estimated near 70 percent. Trust funding done right is the largest retention asset you can build before the parents die. Pricing it decides whether the household experiences the work as deliberate professional service or as paperwork the firm absorbed.

The four-mode trust-funding pricing ladder

There are four ways to charge for trust funding as a service. Each tells the household something different about what the work is, and each fits a different practice economics. The ladder runs from least visible to most ongoing.

The four modes form a ladder because they are not mutually exclusive. The least-visible mode (embedded) is what most RIAs default to. The most-ongoing mode (subscription) is where the model lands when the practice has matured into a full estate planning service line. A practice can run on rung two for new households and rung four for households on annual review, and the choice can shift over time as the firm gets clearer about what the funding work is worth.

Mode 1: Embedded pricing (folded into AUM)

The default for most RIAs. Trust funding is part of "what we do," billed as a percentage of assets under management, never invoiced separately. The household pays the standard 0.75 to 1.25 percent annual fee and trust funding is one of the deliverables that fee covers, alongside investment management, financial planning, and the occasional tax conversation.

You can run this model successfully. RIAs with $250 million to $1 billion in AUM and an established estate-planning service line typically run it. The math works because the AUM growth from retained households across the wealth transfer dwarfs the time cost of the funding work. A household that completes trust funding through the firm and stays through the next generation produces three to five times the lifetime AUM of a household that breaks at transfer. The funding work is a several-thousand-dollar investment per household with a low-six-figure expected return over twenty years.

The structural cost is invisibility. A family that paid nothing identifiable for trust funding remembers nothing identifiable about it. The funding ceremony, the four 90-day touchpoints, the rejection assists, the written close-out, all of that work happens, but the household’s mental model treats the work as background administrative engineering the firm did because the firm did everything. When the surviving spouse looks for someone to call after the first-generation event, the spouse does not recall that the firm specifically ran trust funding because the spouse never saw a price tag or an invoice for it. The work was real. The signal was missing.

Embedded pricing is the right answer for advisor practices where the AUM relationship is dominant, the household is high-touch on every dimension, and the family already perceives the firm as the operational center of the financial life. Where the family’s mental model treats the firm as one vendor among several, embedded pricing reinforces the wrong frame.

Mode 2: Project pricing (flat fee per household)

The advisor invoices a flat fee at the funding engagement. Numbers in current practice range widely. A solo planner running trust funding as a discrete project might charge $1,500 to $4,000 per household for the funding ceremony plus the 90-day execution. An RIA adding estate planning as a service tier might charge $2,500 to $6,000 depending on asset complexity. The fee covers the funding ceremony meeting, the funding packet review, the four touchpoints, and the written close-out. The household receives an invoice. The work has weight.

A worked example. If you charge $3,000 per household and run 24 households per year through trust funding, that is $72,000 in incremental revenue, before any AUM growth from retention. For a solo planner running 8 to 12 households per year through funding, the model is $24,000 to $36,000 in incremental revenue against roughly 200 hours of work, which is a billable rate in the $120 to $180 per hour range. That is below standard planning-engagement rates ($200 to $400 per hour is typical for fee-only planners) but above pure-administrative rates, which is where the trust-funding work belongs.

The retention payoff still applies. Project pricing does not replace the AUM growth from retained households; it is additional revenue that recognizes the funding work as a discrete service. The bigger return is signal-driven: project pricing makes the work visible to the household. The family experiences trust funding as something the advisor did deliberately, on a fee schedule, with a deliverable. The price tag is the message that travels into the family’s mental model and stays there.

The model fits solo planners, hourly-billing RIAs, and project-based fee-only practices. It also fits AUM-based RIAs that want to surface the funding work as an explicit service line without restructuring the entire fee model. A good rule: if your practice already invoices for a financial plan, an investment policy statement, or any other discrete deliverable, you should be invoicing for trust funding too.

Mode 3: Metered pricing (per asset, per letter, per touchpoint)

The vendor pattern. Each funding letter generates a charge. Each beneficiary form filed produces a separate fee. Each touchpoint is invoiced. The household gets an itemized bill that looks like a phone bill from the 1990s.

Almost no advisor practice runs this model.

The model exists in the category, but it lives at the platform layer (vendors that charge advisors per document generated) rather than at the advisor-to-household layer. There is a structural reason. The metered model frames the work as administrative paperwork the household is paying for piece by piece. That framing is exactly the framing a real advisor practice is trying to defeat. The household experiences the funding as a pile of charges. The retention payoff collapses because the family never registers the work as professional engagement.

Some platforms charge advisors $250 to $699 per will or trust generated. The cost gets passed through to the household either as an explicit charge or as margin compression on the AUM relationship. Either way, the per-document model belongs to the platform’s economics rather than the advisor’s. Advisors who want to run trust funding as a retention service should pick a platform where the document generation is included in a flat subscription, and price the advisor’s own work using one of the other three modes.

Mode 4: Subscription pricing (annual retainer for ongoing maintenance)

The recurring model. The household pays an annual fee that covers trust funding plus everything that follows: annual beneficiary review, life-event triggered re-funding (new account opens, beneficiary change, divorce, child reaches majority, business interest restructure), document amendments, and the operational handoff at first-generation event. Numbers in practice run $1,500 to $5,000 per household per year, sometimes embedded as a percentage premium on AUM (an extra 10 to 25 basis points on households in the estate-planning service tier) and sometimes invoiced as a flat annual subscription.

The subscription model fits practices that have moved past "we offer estate planning" and into "estate planning is a recurring service we deliver." The model also maps most cleanly onto the actual lifecycle of the work. Trust funding is not a one-time event; it is a workflow that runs continuously as the household’s facts change. A new brokerage account opens at year three. A child reaches age 18 at year seven. A business interest restructures at year eleven. A spouse dies at year fourteen. Each one of those is a re-funding event. Project pricing does not capture the ongoing work; subscription pricing does.

If you are running a practice with 50 to 200 households on a platform and you have already shipped trust funding for the bulk of them, the subscription model is the right move for the next phase. The recurring price tag tells the family that estate planning is an ongoing service the firm delivers, which means the family thinks about the firm when an estate planning event happens. That is the retention asset.

The right answer for most RIAs

A hybrid. Project pricing at engagement to make the initial funding work visible, plus subscription pricing for the ongoing maintenance to make the recurring service visible.

The hybrid is the right model for most RIAs because it solves the visibility problem at two different time horizons. The project fee at engagement signals to the household that trust funding is a discrete professional service the firm runs deliberately. The subscription fee thereafter signals that estate planning is an ongoing service line the firm delivers across the household’s lifecycle. The combined model maps onto the actual work pattern (intensive at engagement, ongoing thereafter) and produces visible compensation at both phases. The family’s mental model registers the firm as the estate-planning operator, twice: once at signing-and-funding, then again every year on the recurring invoice.

A worked example. An RIA with 100 households charges $3,000 per household for the initial funding engagement and $2,000 per household per year for ongoing maintenance. New households running through funding produce $36,000 to $72,000 in project revenue annually. Existing households on maintenance produce $200,000 in annual recurring revenue once the cohort builds out. Combined, that is north of $250,000 in incremental revenue at maturity, against AUM growth from retention that is meaningfully larger over the wealth transfer window. The fee revenue alone covers a part-time client-service hire to run the funding work; the AUM growth from retained next-generation households is the structural payoff.

If your practice charges entirely on AUM and you cannot restructure the fee model to introduce project or subscription components, the second-best answer is to make embedded pricing visible. Send the household an annual statement showing the work the firm performed under the AUM fee, with a line item for trust funding ("funding ceremony and 90-day execution: $3,000 included") so the family registers the work even though the bill did not change. The work was real. The signal needs to land somewhere.

How Bancroft handles the work the advisor is pricing

The platform handles the document and workflow layer. The advisor handles the pricing and the relationship.

On the document layer, the Asset Inventory captures every household asset and every household person (grantors, successor trustee, named guardians, remainder beneficiaries) in one place. When the advisor sets the funding strategy on each asset (RETITLE_TO_TRUST, TOD_DESIGNATION, BENEFICIARY_DESIGNATION, or NONE), the funding letter system generates the appropriate templates from the six approved categories (BANK, BROKERAGE, RETIREMENT, LIFE INSURANCE, BUSINESS INTERESTS, SAFE DEPOSIT) into a single batched packet. The advisor approves the batch on the Trust Funding tab. The household downloads the packet from the client portal.

On the workflow layer, the daily reminder cron drives client follow-through after the funding ceremony. The household marks each letter mailed (with optional tracking number), uploads encrypted proof of filing to the Digital Safe vault, and the advisor sees completion progress on the funding dashboard. Real estate funding generates a $199 deed recording order routed to the admin processing queue. Complex situations route for $299 attorney review. Amendments and restatements are free across every tier.

Pricing is the advisor’s decision. Bancroft does not bill the household directly for the advisor’s professional time on trust-funding work. The platform fee structure (Advisor $299 a month, Growth $499 a month, Firm $799 a month plus $249 a month per additional seat) is the advisor’s cost. Whatever the advisor charges the household for trust funding as a service is on top of that, set by the practice, invoiced from the practice. The advisor keeps the revenue. The mechanics of the funding letter system are covered in our essay on what banks actually want; the pricing comparison against per-document vendors is at /vs-competitors; the solo-advisor product page is at /for-solo-advisors.

The bottom line

The household pays attention to what the firm charges for. A trust-funding service that is priced into the AUM bill and never invoiced separately is a service the household experiences as background work. A trust-funding service that arrives with a project fee and a subscription line item is a service the household experiences as deliberate professional engagement. The work is identical in both cases. The retention payoff diverges.

The advisors who turn trust funding into a retention asset across the wealth transfer are the advisors who priced the work visibly. The advisors who absorbed the work as a checkbox on the AUM service menu are the advisors who get replaced when the parents die. Pricing is the difference between the family that calls and the family that Googles.