Steward's position on online Living Trusts — and the refund policy we're publishing before anyone has tested it.
A friend called me yesterday. He has my cell number, so he skipped the website and just asked me directly: he wanted a Will.
A few minutes in, it was obvious I wasn't going to sell him one. Multiple businesses.Multiple properties. Real wealth, built over a lot of years. Grown kids. Every one of those is a reason he needs an attorney across a table from him, not a form on a website.
So I told him that. On the phone. Before he ever pulled out a card.
Then I gave him the name of an attorney.
Here's the part I keep thinking about. He didn't hang up annoyed. He asked me who Steward actually IS for. I told him…your kids. Grown, building careers, maybe a mortgage, maybe a first baby on the way. Nothing complicated yet. Nothing in place either.
He passed it along to them.
That's the whole company in one phone call. I lost the sale I could have made and got a family instead.
We don't sell Trusts
Let me say the part most companies leave out.
Trusts are the most profitable product in this industry. An online Living Trust package runs several hundred dollars more than a Will, sometimes double, sometimes triple. Every platform selling one knows exactly what it does to average order value. So do we.
We don't sell them.
Could we build one? I could have a Trust product live in ninety days. That's not a boast; it's the point — this isn't a limitation we're dressing up as ethics. It's a choice, and it stays a choice as long as I'm running this company.
Could we also run the same play everybody else runs…say the scary word, probate, often enough that you reach for your card? Sure. It would be great for our numbers.
It would be terrible for you. And that's not stewardship. That's a checkout page with a conscience problem.
The policy, in writing, on day one
Some situations call for an attorney and not a website. A business. Property in more than one state. A blended family. Real wealth you've spent years building. Here's exactly what we do when yours is one of them.
If you aren't sure which side of that line you're on, email support@withsteward.com before you spend anything. We aren't a law firm. We can't give you legal advice and won't pretend to. What I can tell you is whether this product is right for your situation — and if it isn't, I'll say so before you pay rather than after.
And if you've already paid by the time it becomes clear? You get your money back. Thirty days, full refund, as long as you haven't downloaded your documents.
And you don't leave empty-handed. You tell us where you live and we can put attorney contacts in your hands. Two places we point people to, plus one we don't have any relationship with at all:
The Personal Family Lawyer®directory — firms trained and held accountable to a defined planning process, searchable by state, by specialty (special needs, blended family, business), and by language.
The Christian Legal Society's attorney directory, if a shared faith matters to your family. Worth knowing what it is: a list of attorneys who've identified themselves as Christians. CLS says plainly that it hasn't independently verified their practice areas or qualifications. It's a values filter, not a vetting service. Do your own diligence on top of it.
And your state bar's lawyer referral service, which costs nothing and has coverage everywhere those two don't.
We don't take a referral fee from any attorney. If that ever changes, this page will say so.
One more thing you should know about the Personal Family Lawyer network. They publish an article called "How Cheap Legal Hurts Your Family." They're not wrong. For the family with the rental portfolio and the business, cheap legal absolutely hurts them — that's the same argument I'm making on this page, and it's exactly why I'm sending you there instead of selling you something.
We're writing all of this down publicly on our first day, before the refund has ever been tested. Not as a story about what we've already done. As the thing you get to hold us to.
Nothing here is legal advice, and I'm not your attorney. What's true for your family depends on your state and your situation. If you have questions specific to you and your family's actual situation, you need to consult a licensed attorney.
A Will and a Trust are not two sizes of the same thing
This is where the confusion starts, and the confusion is profitable, so nobody clears it up.
A Will is a set of decisions. Who raises your kids. Who gets what. Who's authorized to act when you can't. You already know those answers…you've just never written them down in a form a court will honor. That's a document problem, and a guided, state-specific process solves it in about twenty minutes.
A Trust is not a document. A Trust is a legal entity you create, then have to move your property into, then maintain for the rest of your life. Signing it is the beginning of the work. Not the end.
That difference is the entire reason we sell one and not the other.
The part nobody tells you until it's too late
A Trust only controls what's actually inside it.
Signing the paperwork does nothing by itself. You have to retitle the house into theTrust's name. Move the bank accounts. Move the brokerage accounts. Record the deed. Handle the LLC interest. That process is called funding, and it involves a county recorder, a bank branch, and a stack of forms that have nothing to do with the website that sold you the Trust.
Let me be honest about what I can and can't prove here. I don't have a study telling you what share of online Trusts never get funded. Nobody publishes one, and I'm not going to invent a number to win an argument.
Here's what I can tell you. The single most common reason people give for not having a will isn't cost and isn't complexity — 43 percent say they just haven't gotten around to it. That's the wall this whole category runs into.
Buying the Trust clears that wall. Somebody finally sits down, after years of meaning to, and handles it in one sitting. Good. But funding is a second wall, and it comes weeks later, when the feeling of having handled it has already worn off. It's a trip to the county recorder. A visit to a bank branch. A call to a brokerage. Separate errands, with institutions that have no relationship to the website that sold you the Trust, and nobody checking whether you went.
So here's how it goes. Somebody pays for an online Trust. They get a professional-lookingPDF. They feel finished, because feeling finished is what they paid for. The house never gets retitled. The accounts never move.
Then they die, and the house goes through probate anyway.
The family finds a Trust in the drawer, assumes everything is handled, and learns otherwise from a court clerk. They bought the thing specifically to avoid the process and got the process anyway…on top of what they spent to avoid it.
An attorney who builds a Trust, funds it, or hands you a checklist and stays on you until it's done. That follow-through is most of what you're paying for.
Some platforms do provide funding instructions, and the better ones do it well. But instructions aren't the hard part. A website can hand you a checklist. It cannot make you go, and it has no way of knowing whether you did.
"Protecting my assets" — from whom?
The other reason people buy a Trust online is asset protection. This one deserves plain language.
A revocable Living Trust is revocable because you keep control. You can change it, dissolve it, pull property back out, spend the money. That control is the feature. It's also exactly why the assets are still legally yours.
Still yours means still reachable. There's nothing to pierce — you never separated the assets from yourself in the first place. A revocable Trust does not shield you from creditors during your lifetime. It does not protect you from a lawsuit. It is not a Medicaid strategy. And that's the analysis before anyone asks whether it was ever funded.
The word"protection" does a lot of work in that marketing, and it does not mean what a reader assumes it means. The irrevocable structures that provide real protection are a genuinely different instrument with genuinely different trade-offs, and nobody should be buying one off a page with a checkout button.
The math on who actually needs one
Here's the arithmetic the Trust-pushing platforms don't put on their homepage.
The federal estate tax exemption stands at fifteen million dollars for an individual and thirty million for a married couple. Fewer than one in a thousand estates in this country will ever owe a dime of it. If avoiding federal estate tax is the reason you're being sold a Trust, ask directly whether your estate is anywhere near that line. For almost everyone, the honest answer is no.
About thirty states, plus the District of Columbia, now offer a transfer-on-death deed — a filing that passes a house directly to the person you name, outside of probate, no Trust required. That list keeps growing; Delaware added one recently, and Maryland has a bill in front of it. Bank and brokerage accounts do the same thing with a beneficiary designation. Retirement accounts and life insurance already work this way.
The other real driver of Trust complexity is owning property in more than one state, which sounds common and isn't. Somewhere in the range of three to five percent of households own a second property at all.
Now, tax and probate aren't the only honest reasons for a Trust, and I'm not going to pretend they are. Blended families. A child with a disability whose benefits depend on how an inheritance is structured. Privacy, because probate is a public record and a Trust isn't. A plan for managing your affairs if you're incapacitated rather than after you're gone. Those are real, and they have nothing to do with the fifteen million dollar line.
State law matters too, and it cuts against us in places. California sets probate fees by statute as a percentage of the estate's gross value, which makes a Trust close to standard advice for a California homeowner. Somebody in a state with streamlined small-estate probate is in a completely different position. There is no national answer here, and anybody who gives you one is selling something.
Add all of it up — the tax exposure, the deed and beneficiary tools, the multi-state question, the non-tax reasons, and the state you actually live in. By our estimate, something like 10 to 20 percent of American families genuinely need a Trust.
That's our professional judgment, not a study. No research body publishes this number, andI'm not going to dress ours up as one. But every component of it is above, in the open, where you can check it.
So if you think the number's wrong, the pieces are right there. Tell me which one.
The other 80percent need a clear, state-specific, legally binding Will. A guardian named. Who gets what. Who decides if you can't.
If you're in that 10 to 20 percent
High net worth.Multiple rental properties. A second home in another state. Complex business interests. A blended family with children from different marriages. A child with a disability whose benefits depend on how an inheritance is structured. A state with its own estate or inheritance tax, which kicks in far below the federal number.
If that's you, we refund you and hand you a name — the directories are up at the top of this page, and you don't have to start with us to use them. Not a downgrade. Not a stripped-down version of the real thing. Your money back, and somewhere better to go.
Why would we turn away a customer who's ready to pay?
Because you spent your life building this. Rental income you scraped together one property at a time. A business you carried through the years nobody saw. A second home that took a decade. That's not a checkout flow. That's a life's work, and a life's work deserves somebody who can look at all of it at once, ask questions no form will ever think to ask, and build something around the answers.
Taking your money for a generic Trust would be great for our average order value. It would leave you improperly protected, and you'd never find out until the moment it mattered, and you weren't there to fix it.
We're not going to do that. Not because we're better people. Because we named this companySteward, and the word has to mean something on the days it's expensive.
There is no one-size-fits-all
One more thing before you type "online living trust" into a search bar.
Most states offer a whole range of Trust structures, used different ways for different situations. In some cases an LLC is the smarter vehicle for transferring wealth. In others it's a family office, or a specific irrevocable structure, or a combination nobody would arrive at from a template. The right answer depends on your state, your asset mix, your family structure, and what you're trying to accomplish twenty years out.
No website knows that. A website knows which package you clicked.
If you've built real wealth, don't be cheap here. This is the one place you HAVE to get it right, and the difference between the right structure and a generic one shows up as a number your family will actually feel. Saving a few hundred dollars on the front end of a plan meant to hold for thirty years is the worst trade in this entire category.
A note to the attorneys reading this
I'll say this plainly, because I'd want somebody to say it to me.
I'm not competing with you. I have no interest in the client with the rental portfolio and the S-corp and the second marriage. That client needs you, and needs you badly, and the version of that client who tried to handle it themselves on a website is the file you'll spend three years cleaning up after they're gone.
What I want is the client you don't want yet. The couple with a mortgage, two kids under ten, and no guardian named. They aren't a fit for your practice today — the hourly math doesn't work for either of you, and you both know it. So right now they get nothing, and "nothing" is what most of them still have when the worst day arrives.
We take care of those families. Will done, guardian named, powers of attorney signed, healthcare directive in place. And when their life gets complicated enough that they've outgrown us — the business takes off, the second property closes, the family blends — we tell them so, refund them, and hand them to somebody like you.
Call it a farm team if you want. I'd take that.
The only thingI'd ask in return: if there's a family in your office who genuinely can'tjustify your fee yet, send them our way instead of sending them home with nothing. They'll come back to you when it's time. And they'll come back with their affairs in better shape than if they'd spent another decade meaning to get around to it.
So why do we sell Wills online?
Fair question. If you're asking it, you're reading carefully.
Because a Will's decisions, and you already own the decisions. The hard part was never legal…it was sitting down and making them. Turning those decisions into a valid, state-specific document is a solved problem, and charging attorney rates for a solved problem is a large part of how this industry earned its reputation.
A Trust isn't a solved problem. It's an ongoing relationship with your own property, and it needs somebody who can see all of it.
We builtSteward for the 80 percent. One flat price — $199 for an individual, $299 for a married couple. No tiers, no premium version, no Trust waiting behind a paywall, because there isn't one to sell you.
We say that out loud, and we say it even when saying it sends you somewhere we don't get paid.
That's the whole position. If it costs us the sale, it costs us the sale.
One more time, because this page covers a lot of legal ground: none of it is legal advice, and I'm not your attorney. Trust law, probate, and estate tax vary by state and by situation. Before you act on anything here, talk to someone who can look at yours.
Start your Will today. About twenty minutes, one flat price, and no upsell waiting at the end of it.