The Story Behind Heirloom: Grief, Unclaimed Assets, and the Estate Settlement System Families Deserve

Heirloom Co-founder and CEO Davis Wilkinson recently appeared on two podcasts to discuss why Heirloom exists and what it means for the professionals who support families through loss. On AssetFynd's Finders Keepers (episode: "Estate of Mind") and The Currency of Grief with host Justin Weidenfeld, Davis speaks about the personal loss that led him to found Heirloom, the systemic gaps that make estate settlement so difficult for the families professionals serve, and how Heirloom's managed service is changing that.

The origin story

Davis's path to founding Heirloom started with his own family's experience of loss. After his brother passed away, Davis watched his mother navigate estate administration while grieving: closing accounts, winding down a household, dealing with financial institutions, managing family dynamics across state lines. His brother didn't have much. There was no formal probate. And yet it was still overwhelming.

"Even as a kid, I remember thinking this is wrong. She just lost her son and she has to be on the phone fighting to cancel his membership and fly out to clean out a house and talk with the banks."

Davis didn't assume he understood the industry from the outside. Before founding Heirloom, he took a job as a funeral home receptionist to learn it firsthand. He wanted to understand the customer journey, build relationships with potential partners in the death care space, and sit with the reality that grieving families face. What he found reinforced what he already suspected: the administrative burden of estate settlement falls on people at the worst possible moment, with almost no infrastructure to support them.

He built Heirloom to be what his mother never had.

The burden professionals see every day

Estate and financial professionals know this well. The families and executors you work with are navigating a process that is almost always harder than they expected.

On average, estate settlement takes well over 100 hours of an executor's time, and frequently 400 to 500 hours for complex estates. The process can span 12 to 18 months and cost thousands of dollars in fees. And the cognitive toll compounds the emotional one. Grief reduces cognitive capacity at exactly the moment when executors are asked to manage a new legal system, communicate with financial institutions, and make consequential decisions on behalf of a family, Davis explains.

Executors are, in fact, twice as likely to experience mental health challenges as other family members going through the same loss. The administrative burden of probate is not just a logistical problem. It is a wellbeing problem.

Family conflict makes it worse. The estates you work on regularly surface the dynamic Davis hears about every day from Heirloom clients: you don't really know someone until you've had to share an inheritance with them. Executors are caught in the middle, carrying fiduciary responsibility at the same time they are managing grief and navigating relationships under stress.

The unclaimed asset problem in every estate

One area where professional partners can add immediate, measurable value for clients is asset discovery. The scale of what is being missed is significant.

96% of estates contain unclaimed assets. These range from dormant brokerage accounts and forgotten life insurance policies to government-held property and uncashed savings bonds. The reasons assets go missing are often mundane: paper statements stopped arriving, an account went dormant, a policy was purchased and filed away and never found again.

The numbers behind it are not mundane:

• 1 in 4 life insurance policies goes unclaimed in the United States
• Davis has personally reviewed a case with $8 million in unclaimed property sitting in public databases, likely never to reach its rightful heirs
• An estimated $2 trillion of the $84 to 100 trillion generational wealth transfer projected over the next 15 to 20 years is at risk of going unclaimed

Heirloom addresses this directly. Its inheritance discovery engine searches over 120 billion public records across 6,000+ data sources, including credit bureaus and financial data partners, to build a complete financial picture of an estate. This goes far beyond the handful of public portals most families find on their own. For the professionals managing these estates, it means fewer assets left on the table and a more complete inventory from the start.

Davis also made the policy case publicly: the U.S. should follow the UK's lead in establishing enforceable standards for how financial institutions work with executors. Until that happens, the gap falls to professionals and platforms like Heirloom to fill.

What Heirloom's managed service does

Heirloom's managed service is designed to take the administrative burden off of individual executors entirely, allowing them and the families around them to focus on grieving and healing.

When a family engages Heirloom's managed service, Heirloom handles the legwork from the start, building a personalized estate plan drawn from a database of close to 1,500 individual steps covering the specific assets, jurisdiction, and family circumstances at hand. Executors are brought in for all major decisions. Everything else is managed by Heirloom's team, supported by AI and technology automations running in the background.

The result is an estimated 80% or greater reduction in executor hours. And because Heirloom's efficiencies come from technology rather than headcount, the cost reflects it. Professional executors and fiduciaries typically charge 3 to 5% of the gross estate value. Heirloom's managed service is 1%.

"We're in the business of burden relief. Our systems handle the administration, and then I get to talk with this family and mourn a loved one and celebrate the life of someone they truly loved."

Why this matters for professional partners

Heirloom is actively building partnerships with estate attorneys, professional fiduciaries, and financial advisors. The goal is not to replace the professionals clients already trust. It is to give those professionals a resource that handles the administrative complexity while they focus on the legal, financial, and relational work only they can do.

For your clients who are serving as executors, getting support from the beginning makes a measurable difference. As Davis notes, the executives who come to Heirloom midstream consistently say the same thing: they underestimated how hard the process would be and wish they had started with help.

For the clients who have not yet lost someone, the most important step remains simple. Create a will. Create a trust. Keep them current. Roughly 60% of Americans die without a will, which turns estate settlement into a longer, more expensive, and more contentious process for everyone involved. Encouraging clients to plan ahead is one of the highest-value things a professional can do for the families they serve.

Listen to both episodes

• Watch the Finders Keepers "Estate of Mind" episode on YouTube
• Watch The Currency of Grief episode on YouTube or listen on Apple Podcasts and Spotify
• Learn more about partnering with Heirloom at heirloom.care

---

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.