Introducing Asset Discovery for Living Clients
By Heirloom · · 7 min read
Heirloom's asset discovery, until now available only for decedents, is extending to living persons this week — so a trust can be funded against an inventory that was actually searched for instead of one the client recalled from memory.
This is the feature estate planners have been asking us for since we launched. Heirloom was built around the administration file: a decedent, a fiduciary with authority to act, and a search that reconstructs what the person owned after they are no longer available to ask. Starting this week, the same search runs for clients who are very much alive.
Attorneys open a living-person search from the org dashboard they already use, the client signs a single authorization, and results populate into the same inventory and net worth views the firm reviews today. Nothing about the review workflow changes. What changes is that the planning side of the practice finally gets to work from verified information.
Why Trust Funding Is the Weak Point in an Otherwise Good Plan
A revocable trust does not control anything by virtue of being signed. It controls what has been retitled into it. The drafting can be flawless, the dispositive provisions exactly right, the successor trustee well chosen — and if the brokerage account was never retitled and the deed was never recorded to the trustee, the trust simply does not govern that asset. Funding is what converts a document into a plan, and funding is the step most likely to be left half-finished.
Part of the reason is structural: funding usually happens after the signing meeting, and much of it lands on the client as homework. They are handed a list of institutions to contact, transfer forms to chase, and beneficiary designations to update, at exactly the moment the engagement feels finished to them. Even diligent clients complete the easy items — the primary checking account, the house — and quietly stall on the rest. Then the plan drifts. New accounts get opened in the years after signing and never make it into the trust, because nobody revisits the schedule of assets.
The deeper problem is that the funding list is built from the client's own recollection. Counsel cannot retitle an account nobody mentioned, and the assets most likely to go unmentioned are precisely the ones a client has stopped thinking about. A pour-over will is the designed backstop here, but it is a probate proceeding by definition — the exact outcome the client paid to avoid — and it only reaches assets someone eventually identifies. Anything nobody finds does not pour anywhere; it sits, goes dormant, and eventually escheats to the state as unclaimed property. None of this surfaces during the engagement. It surfaces a decade later, in front of a successor trustee, usually after the drafting attorney has left the matter.
Planning Has Administration's Search Problem, Earlier and Quieter
In administration, the search problem is impossible to miss. Someone has died, the family cannot reconstruct a financial life from a shoebox of statements, and the gap between what the decedent owned and what the executor can find is visible to everyone on the file.
In planning, the same gap exists and almost nothing exposes it. A client completes an intake questionnaire listing the house, the checking account, the brokerage they log into, and the 401(k) at their current employer. Counsel drafts around that list, the funding instructions are built from it, and the engagement closes without anything ever testing whether the list was complete. The modern financial life is not the kind of thing people recall accurately: industry analysis counts roughly 31.9 million forgotten or left-behind 401(k) accounts holding on the order of $2.1 trillion, with an average balance near $66,691. Those accounts belong to living people who forgot about them.
Add the holdings that leave no paper trail at all — the online-only bank, the self-directed brokerage opened once and left alone, the fintech cash account that went paperless at signup — and the questionnaire stops resembling an inventory and starts resembling a memory test. It is the same search that administration requires, run twenty years earlier, when the client is still around to sign a transfer form and the fix costs nothing.
What's Available This Week
Asset discovery now runs for living persons natively in the Heirloom platform. There is no separate tool, no vendor portal, and no new interface to learn: it is a case type alongside the decedent searches your firm already runs.
An attorney kicks off the search from the org dashboard exactly as they do today. The notable difference is that the paperwork gets lighter, not heavier. A decedent search has to establish someone else's authority to act — letters testamentary, appointment documentation, an authorization signed in a representative capacity. A living-person search needs one signed self-authorization from the client, permitting Heirloom to search for and disclose their own accounts and assets. Fewer documents, fewer signatures, and no question about whose authority is being exercised.
From there the search runs against more than 120 billion public and private records across 6,000+ databases: bank and brokerage accounts, retirement plans including ones stranded at former employers, real property, business interests, unclaimed property already sitting with state programs, and debts. It is the same institutional sweep behind our decedent searches, pointed at a living subject.
The Client Can Also Connect Their Own Records
Record searches find what institutions and public registries report. The rest of a financial life is visible only in the client's own mail and transactions, which is where Heirloom's email and bank statement analysis comes in — now available to living clients on their own accounts.
The client connects their inbox and their bank accounts, and Heirloom reads through statements, notices, and transaction history to surface what shows up there: accounts they no longer think about, policies they are still paying premiums on, subscriptions, and debts. This is optional and runs only at the client's direction on their own records.
In practice this is where the small forgotten items come from, because a recurring charge is often the last remaining evidence that an account exists at all. A $14 premium debited every month is a policy. An annual fee from a custodian nobody mentioned is an account that needs a beneficiary designation.
Where the Results Land
Results populate through the usual patterns, into the same asset inventory and net worth views your firm already works in. Attorneys receive notifications as findings flow in, so nobody has to sit and refresh a dashboard while a search completes in the background.
The practical effect is that a living-person matter reads like a decedent matter with a different subject. Your team reviews the same kind of work product, in the same place, using the same judgment about what to act on — and because the output is a real inventory rather than a list of leads, it can go straight into a funding conversation with the client.
It also gives the annual review something concrete to work from. Clients can run a search on themselves once a year, which maps neatly onto a review cadence: the inventory from the initial engagement becomes the baseline, and a later search shows what has been opened, closed, or left outside the trust since the plan was signed.
What Firms Do With It
Fund the trust against a searched inventory. Instead of building funding instructions from the questionnaire, build them from a list that was actually searched for. The orphaned 401(k) and the forgotten brokerage account get retitled or receive a beneficiary designation while the client is alive to sign for it — rather than surfacing in probate, or not surfacing at all.
Inform Medicaid and benefits planning. Planning that turns on an accurate picture of countable resources gets materially riskier when that picture is self-reported. The same search that supports trust funding supports the specialized trusts whose entire function depends on knowing what the client holds and when they acquired it.
Leave the file better than you found it. A planning engagement that produces a verified inventory produces something durable. When the matter eventually becomes an administration — often at the same firm — the successor trustee starts from a searched inventory instead of a shoebox, and work counsel did years earlier becomes visible to the family at precisely the moment they are deciding who to call.
The Boundaries, Stated Plainly
Three limits are worth knowing before you describe this to a client, and each is covered in the FAQ below. Living-person discovery is self-search only. Life insurance coverage is more limited than it is for estates, because the NAIC Life Insurance Policy Locator and carrier lost-policy portals require a date of death — so this should not be presented to living clients as policy discovery. And a client can run a search on themselves once per year, a data provider constraint rather than a product decision. The search itself involves a soft credit inquiry, which has no effect on a credit score.
The self-search boundary is the one that looks like a limitation and is actually the design. A person can search for their own assets; nobody can run a search on another living person — not counsel, not a family member, not a fiduciary. That is what keeps the consent model clean: one subject, one signature, no chain of authority to evaluate. A search of someone's entire financial footprint should require that person's own authorization and nobody else's.
Where Heirloom Fits
Estate planning has always been asked to work from an inventory it had no way to verify, and trust funding is where that assumption quietly fails. Heirloom closes the gap on the planning side of the practice the same way it closed it on the administration side: the client signs one authorization, the platform searches more than 120 billion public and private records across 6,000+ databases, and the trust gets funded against what the client actually owns instead of what they managed to recall on a Tuesday afternoon.
Living-person searches are available to Heirloom firms this week. Schedule a demo to see one run end to end.
Heirloom is not a law firm and cannot provide legal advice. This content is for informational purposes only. Heirloom can only provide self-help services at users' specific direction.