The POV: When financial advisors and wealth managers have their phones ringing off the wall with clients calling. Economic markets are volatile and moving in concerning directions outside of risk comfort zones. Portfolios are down, inflation is up, news headlines are alarming, and the questions being asked are harder than usual with answers uncertain. Nearly every financial advisor and wealth manager in the country is navigating the same environment right now.
But what separates the advisors who use this opportunity to create deeper, more loyal client relationships, from those who those who simply weather the storm, is the willingness to move beyond portfolio commentary and into proactive, value-driven future planning that most of your competitors do not offer.
Periods of global disruption and market volatility are inflection points, moments when your clients are most open to big-picture planning conversations, when temporary dislocations in asset valuations create genuine estate planning opportunities, and when the structure around a client's wealth proves its worth or reveals its gaps. The advisors who act decisively in these windows, rather than waiting for clarity, position their clients for enduring advantages that compound over decades.
When geopolitical or economic shocks arrive, your clients face two categories of risk.
The first is portfolio risk, visible, quantifiable, and top of mind for everyone. Your clients can see it in their account statements. They can feel it. They want to talk about it.
The second is structural risk, and it is far more dangerous in the long run because it is almost entirely invisible until a triggering black swan event forces it into the open. Structural risk occurs when a client's business sells under duress and no asset protection is in place. Or, when a client dies unexpectedly, and the trust document language does not align with how you serve the family, or it automatically removes you from the relationship. It is what happens when a legal judgment arrives at the worst possible moment against assets that were never properly insulated.
Periods of global instability dramatically increase the frequency of these events and the clients who have well-designed trust structures already in place navigate them from a completely different position than those who do not. Your job, right now, is to know which of your clients are in which camp, and to act on that knowledge.
Asset protection structures need time to season before they reach their full effectiveness. Courts look backward at transfers made in anticipation of known threats. Once a crisis is visible in the headlines, your client's protective planning window has already narrowed. The clients best positioned in any period of uncertainty are the ones whose structures were built before the disruption arrived.
Most advisors underutilize temporarily depressed asset valuations during periods of market disruption, yet they are among the most powerful inputs in the estate-planning toolkit. The lower your clients' assets are valued today, the more efficiently those assets can be moved across generations and into protective structures. If you wait for calm and recovery before having these conversations, the opportunity may be gone.
If you move now, the advantages compound over decades. Here is where to focus:
When your clients' asset prices are depressed, their lifetime exemption dollars accomplish significantly more. A Grantor Retained Annuity Trust (GRAT) funded with a business interest or equity portfolio that has declined in value can transfer far greater wealth to the next generation if those assets recover, because appreciation above the hurdle rate passes gift-tax free. The lower the starting valuation, the larger the potential transfer.
A Spousal Lifetime Access Trust (SLAT) established now moves assets out of a taxable estate at a discount, while still allowing your client's spouse to benefit during their lifetime. If you have clients who have been circling these conversations but waiting for the right moment, this is it..
At Wealth Advisors Trust Company, we work directly with you and your clients' estate-planning attorneys to administer these structures efficiently once they are established, so the planning opportunity you create is not lost to administrative delays.
Periods of global instability tend to precede significant fiscal and tax policy changes. Governments facing economic pressure look for revenue. Lifetime exemption amounts, estate tax thresholds, and capital gains treatment are all legislative targets, and history suggests those changes rarely arrive with advance notice.
Structures your clients build now provide insulation in two ways: through gifts and transfers completed before a policy change, which typically grandfather existing treatment, and properly established irrevocable trusts are generally not subject to retroactive modification. Building flexibility into structures today, including trust protector provisions and decanting authority, creates optionality for your clients that will matter when the legislative environment shifts. This is a planning conversation you can have with virtually every client who has a significant estate, and almost none of your competitors are having it proactively.
Annual exclusion gifting is simple, but it becomes significantly more powerful when the assets being gifted are temporarily depressed in value. A gift of business interests, real estate fractional interests, or closely held stock at a low valuation transfers more economic value than the same gift at peak prices, using the same exemption. For your clients with significant estates, a coordinated gifting program initiated during a market downturn can meaningfully transfer more wealth across generations at no additional gift tax cost than the same program started a year from now, when values have recovered.
For clients considering charitable giving, a volatile environment creates specific structural opportunities. A Charitable Remainder Trust (CRT) funded with highly appreciated or volatile assets removes those assets from the taxable estate, provides an income stream to your client, and delivers a partial charitable deduction.
A Charitable Lead Annuity Trust (CLAT) can be particularly effective in a lower interest-rate environment, where the IRS hurdle rate is reduced and more wealth passes to family beneficiaries tax-efficiently.
If you have clients whose philanthropic intentions have been in the background while you focused on investment management, now is an ideal time to bring those conversations to the forefront. At WATC, we administer charitable trusts alongside traditional family trusts, so you can offer an integrated solution that covers both goals within a single coordinated structure.
Beyond the strategic opportunities that volatility creates, your clients need to know that the structures around their wealth will hold up when things get hard. Here is what a well-designed trust provides that no portfolio can:
Assets held in a properly drafted irrevocable trust are generally not reachable by future creditors of the grantor. South Dakota, where Wealth Advisors Trust Company is chartered, offers what many legal experts consider the strongest Domestic Asset Protection Trust (DAPT) statute in the country.
A settlor can be a discretionary beneficiary of their own irrevocable trust while protecting assets from future creditors after a two-year seasoning period. In an environment where business stress, litigation risk, and financial pressure are all elevated, that protection is not theoretical. It is the difference between a client's wealth surviving a crisis intact or not.
If your clients have individual trustees, whether a family member, sibling, or close friend, those trustees are navigating the same stressful environment your clients are. A crisis is exactly when individual trustee arrangements are most likely to break down: through health issues, family conflict, unavailability, or simply the weight of the responsibility.
A professional corporate trustee at WATC does not have those vulnerabilities. Trust administration continues with consistency and precision regardless of what is happening externally. For clients who have never considered what happens to their trust if their individual trustee cannot perform, this conversation is worth having today.
South Dakota's abolition of the Rule Against Perpetuities means that a trust established here can last in perpetuity. For your clients, this means that the structure you help them build today is not just a planning tool for this moment in time, but a foundation that will last across generations. It will outlast every disruption, every market cycle, and every geopolitical event that comes after this one.
When you present this to clients who are anxious about the future, the perpetual trust is not just a legal structure. It is a statement of long-term confidence that most advisors never think to make.
Volatility is an opportunity for planning and relationship-building. Your clients are anxious and looking for a stability anchor. The advisors who serve as comprehensive planning partners will deepen client relationships in ways that market performance alone never could.
Here is where to start:
You do not need to be a trust expert to start these conversations. You need to be the advisor who raises the question before the moment of urgency arrives. We will be your resource for everything that comes next. That is the entire point of the WATC model: supporting your expertise, protecting your client relationships, and staying entirely out of your lane on investment management.
A brief but important caveat: asset protection trusts need time to reach their full effectiveness. Transfers made with the intent to defraud known creditors are not protected, and courts scrutinize transfers when specific threats are already visible. South Dakota's DAPT statute has a two-year seasoning period, meaning the protective clock starts only when the transfer is made.
This is not a reason to wait. It is the reason to act now rather than later. The clients who will have the most options in the next disruption are the ones whose structures are already seasoned before it arrives. Every day you delay is a day later that the clock starts.
In every disruption lies a moment for reinvention. The advisors who will be remembered by their clients for this period are not the ones who sent the best portfolio update email. They are the ones who called proactively, identified the structural gaps, coordinated the planning team, and helped their clients capture the opportunities that most people missed because they were too focused on the noise.
At Wealth Advisors Trust Company, we have grown from zero to $4.4 billion in assets under administration since 2009 by building an institution that makes exactly that kind of advisor look even better. Kind, responsive, and collaborative trust administration. No investment management. No competition with you for your clients' assets. Just the best possible trust partner for advisors who expect more. Let's talk about what that looks like for your book.
