What is Gentreo?
Gentreo is an online estate planning platform that makes estate planning affordable and accessible. With Gentreo, users create state-specific documents such as wills, trusts, health care proxies, and more. Next, users can save and share these and other important information. Gentreo offers coaching, onboarding, legal reviews, and funeral planning too.
Industry background
Everyone over 18 needs an estate plan yet only about 20% of Americans have a current plan. This means choices are left to the courts to decide what healthcare decisions are made if one can’t make them, who gets what assets if there is no will, and worse yet who gets one’s children and pets. With COVID affecting so many, estate planning is a growing marketplace. The market today is about a $175B market according to IBIS with no one company having a greater than 5% share.
The estate planning industry is served by lawyers across the United States. It is evolving with new online technology. Large online legal document providers such as LegalZoom and Rocket Lawyer both offer estate planning documents such as wills and trusts. Some services provide some documents for free like a health care proxy. Common amongst all is that users must know what documents they need before starting the often seemingly complex process.
Why Gentreo was created
Based in Boston, Gentreo was created by sisters Renee and Julie Fry with the mission of helping families protect what matters most to them –knowing that estate planning documents alone were not enough. The Fry sisters’ family paid $10,000 to do the paperwork for estate planning but found that many questions were left unanswered, and help was hard to get. Families need to know what documents do what and when they are used. Families need to be able to find their documents and share them with whomever matters to them. And estate planning has emotional and financial aspects to it as well.
How Gentreo works
Through Gentreo, users can create state-specific documents and securely store and share their documents in the Gentreo Digital Vault. Gentreo even includes pet documents like a pet trust and pet power of attorney as Gentreo knows pets are part of the family too. Next, Gentreo offers a suite of extras, such as estate planning coaching, onboarding guidance, legal reviews, and funeral planning. These added benefits truly separate Gentreo from any of the other estate planning companies today. Gentreo recently was awarded the Real Simple Smart Money Award for Life Events.
With Gentreo, documents are just a click away. A customer in Iowa was asked by her father in Florida for help in preparing his health care proxy and will before a major surgery. The customer was planning to travel to Florida but had critical work issues so did not want to leave Iowa. Through Gentreo, she was able to help her father update his healthcare proxy and will in less than an hour, he quickly and easily executed them following the instructions provided, and got the health care proxy to the doctors. Time and money were saved and better yet, the family got the help they needed when they needed it.
About the team
Gentreo was founded by three women forever out to change estate planning to make it easy, fast and affordable while including the emotional and financial elements too. Gentreo has grown its team significantly and is well on its way to forever improving estate planning as the team continues to launch game changing products and services. Renee Fry, the CEO and a founder says, “Estate planning is more than just a one-time document like a trust or will. It’s the plan you need to take care of all you love. Marriages, babies, helping care for aging parents – all are important life events that means plans need to change, too, and Gentreo is there for (its) customers throughout all of life."
check them out: www.gentreo.com