Senior Estate Planner

A typical week often involves client meetings, document drafting, and coordination with attorneys, accountants, and trustees — sitting with a family on a generation-skipping trust, reviewing draft wills and revocable trust documents, working through closely-held-business succession plans, coordinating with outside counsel on complex structures. You're often the senior planner when families face the most personal and consequential financial decisions. Plans implemented and client satisfaction are the indirect measures.

The harder part is often the family dynamics that surface in estate planning — wealth transfer involves siblings, second marriages, special-needs children, and intergenerational tensions, and the senior planner navigates all of it. Variance across employers is wide: at private banks and trust companies you have institutional infrastructure; at law firms or independent advisory practices you build personal client relationships.

People who tend to thrive here have legal or accounting depth, strong personal judgment, and the patience for emotionally consequential client work. JD, CPA, CFP, and CTFA credentials anchor seniority. The trade-off is the long-arc nature of estate work — plans implemented today play out over decades.