Ask ten people. Ten of them don’t have one. 6 in 10 American adults have no will, not because they don’t love their families, but because planning always felt expensive, complicated, and easy to put off. InstaTrust is a self-help platform that changes that: a complete living trust plan, built from your own answers, guided by a licensed professional you already know, prepared for independent attorney review.
Wealthy families have attorneys on retainer and can afford a two-year court process. Working families can’t. If your estate is a house, a retirement account, and a phone full of photos, you have MORE reason to keep it out of court, not less, because your family can least afford the cost and the delay. You don’t think you have an estate? You own a phone full of photos and maybe some kids. That’s an estate.
The traditional route runs about $2,500 with an attorney and takes 4 to 6 weeks. For most families that lands in the “someday” pile.
Here’s the reframe that changes everything: most of an estate plan is about while you’re ALIVE. Who speaks for you if you’re sick. Who handles the bills. Who raises your kids if you can’t. You’re not planning a death. You’re preventing a mess.
43% of people without a plan say they just haven’t gotten around to it. That’s not a character flaw. That’s an industry that never came to your kitchen table.
Probate is the court process your family goes through to receive what you already meant for them to have. Picture a long DMV line, except it’s your family standing in it after you’re gone, in public, often for a year or more.
The national average runs around 20 months. California’s own court system tells families to expect 9 to 18 months for a formal probate. While the estate waits, the bills don’t: the mortgage, taxes, insurance, and upkeep keep running the entire time.
In statutory states the fees are calculated on the GROSS value of what you own, before debts. A $900,000 house with an $800,000 mortgage is billed as a $900,000 asset, even though your family only inherits $100,000 of equity.
A will says who gets your things, but a judge still has to check it first. A will is the probate instruction manual. A trust is what skips the line.
Pick your state, enter what you own, and watch the number update in real time.
🔒 The math runs in your browser. Your itemized numbers are never sent anywhere or stored.
InstaTrust started with a simple observation: the families who most need a plan are the ones the industry never reaches. Estate planning was priced for the wealthy, wrapped in Latin, and delivered in law offices most people never visit. The do-it-yourself websites went the other way: type into a form alone, pay at the end, and hope you understood the questions.
We built a third way: your family, your answers, your professional. A licensed professional you already know walks you through a guided conversation. Every question is asked in plain English with the why explained next to it. Your plan is prepared from your own answers, packaged for independent attorney review, and delivered by the person who sat with you, someone who will still pick up the phone next year.
No hourly meter. No six-week wait. No pressure to decide anything on the spot. On every single screen: “Here’s how each option works — the choice is yours.”
Cornelius Vanderbilt died the richest man in America. In 1973, at a Vanderbilt family reunion, 120 of his descendants gathered. Not one was a millionaire. The Rockefellers built their wealth in the same era, and seven generations later the family is still thriving.
The difference was never the size of the fortune. It was the system. Here’s the part most people get wrong: the Rockefellers didn’t stay rich because of any financial product. They stayed rich because of the TRUST that owned everything, the instructions, the conditions, the required family meetings. A beneficiary form hands your family a lump-sum check with zero instructions. A trust passes what you built with direction, protection, and a plan.
And that system was never actually reserved for the rich. It’s paperwork. The right paperwork.
Most people think a trust is a list of names and percentages. The trusts wealthy families use go further, and yours can too. These are real provisions you can choose, in plain English, one checkbox at a time:
Money that stays in the trust never legally belongs to your child, which means their divorce, their lawsuit, or their bankruptcy can’t touch it. Your daughter divorces at 40? Her ex’s lawyer gets nothing. She never owned the inheritance. The trust did.
Tuition paid directly to the school, so they graduate free instead of starting life with the average $25,000 of student debt.
The trust adds a dollar for every dollar they earn. A $45,000 teaching job becomes $90,000. Work just became twice as valuable.
If a beneficiary is struggling, cash pauses but treatment is ALWAYS paid. The trust can’t be drained by a bad year, and it never abandons them in one.
Instead of gifts that vanish, the trust makes loans for a business or a first home, and the repayments refill the pot for the next kid, and the next generation.
Everything landing at 18, all at once, is the age most likely to lose it. Stage it: some at 25, more at 30, or a monthly paycheck that teaches habits first.
A married couple with two children receives 20 personalized documents. A single parent receives 13. Every plan includes at least 9. The core: your Revocable Living Trust, a Pour-Over Will for each spouse, your healthcare directives and financial powers of attorney, a Certificate of Trust (the short notarized proof a bank accepts, so you never hand over the whole trust), and a personalized funding checklist naming your actual bank and your actual county.
Then the part nobody else does: every person in your plan gets their own letter. Your successor trustee gets a plain-English “what to do first” letter. Your children’s guardian gets a briefing on what raising your kids under this plan actually means. Written deliberately at a 5th-grade reading level, because they will be reading this on the worst week of their life.
The binder itself: navy cover with a double gold frame, your family’s photo above your trust’s name, an “Estate at a Glance” page listing every person in the plan, and a red wax SIGN HERE seal on every signature line, the same sticky-tab standard title companies use at closings. Your Legacy Letter is printed on its own ivory parchment sheet, your first name in script, marked “Personal keepsake — no attorney review required.” Your words, verbatim. The system is forbidden from editing them.
Two spellings of the same person, a minor accidentally named as a trustee, a birthdate that doesn’t add up. Problems get fixed before they can ever reach a document.
3,715 statutory citations verified against primary legal sources across all 50 states plus DC, and 1,341 state-specific required-provision rules. By design, the system can only see YOUR state’s law while writing your documents.
Every cited statute checked against the verified database, every name checked against your answers, every reference resolved. A document that fails is rebuilt and re-verified. If it still fails, it is not delivered. Names, birthdates, and phone numbers are corrected by plain code, never left to AI judgment.
A secure link, a code to your email, your entire plan read back in plain English, and a button that says “Create my documents.” If the final quality review catches anything, nothing ships and nothing is charged.
Here’s what the industry rarely says out loud: a signed trust that was never funded protects nothing. Funding means actually moving what you own INTO the trust. Skip it, and your family inherits a beautiful, empty box, and still goes to court for the treasure. The Oregon State Bar puts it bluntly: if you establish a trust but fail to transfer your assets to it, it is unlikely you will avoid probate. It’s one of the most common failures attorneys see.
Most assets are easy: bank accounts change an owner name, life insurance updates a beneficiary. The house is the one that gets skipped, because the house isn’t a form. It’s a deed: a new legal document, signed before a notary, recorded at the county, and confirmed at TWO separate offices that can each fail on their own.
It gets harder: in 28 states, your spouse has to sign that deed even when they’re not on the title. Miss that and the deed is defective, no title company will insure it, and nobody finds out until the house is being sold or you’re gone.
In California, no: the law says a transfer into your own revocable trust is not a change in ownership.
No. Federal law (the Garn-St Germain Act) specifically protects transferring your home into your own living trust from due-on-sale clauses.
This is why InstaTrust treats funding as part of the plan, not an afterthought. Your deed is prepared for your state’s exact rules, with your county’s actual recording office (the system knows 676 of them by name, address, and fee schedule) and your state’s required forms auto-filled. Your funding checklist names your actual institutions and even what to say if a teller balks. Your agent follows through until the recorded deed comes back with your trust’s name on it.
Skipping court is not the same as being done. The day your family uses the trust, somebody, usually your successor trustee, still has real work: proving they’re in charge, notifying people, valuing assets, filing taxes. Most companies sell the trust and go quiet about that day. We build for it: your trustee gets their own instruction letter and briefing, written for a person having the worst week of their life, and your agent stays in the picture.
One example of why guidance matters: money left sitting inside a trust reaches the top 37% federal tax bracket at just $16,000 of income in a year. A person doesn’t reach it until $640,600. It’s the kind of trap a prepared trustee, with the right professionals around them, knows to watch for, and exactly why your plan ships with instructions, not just signatures.
InstaTrust works through licensed professionals, real people who sit with your family, answer questions, and follow through. If someone shared InstaTrust with you, ask them for your personal link.