About The Estate Planning Guide

The Estate Planning Guide is an independent information site about wills, trusts, probate, life insurance, funeral planning, and the decisions that protect the people you love.

We are a publisher, not a seller. We don’t sell legal services, insurance policies, or financial products. We don’t collect your phone number. We don’t run sales calls. We write plain-English guides, cite our sources, and try to be useful.

Why this site exists

Estate planning is a heavy topic. Most of the content out there is either confusingly technical (written by attorneys for other attorneys) or aggressively sales-driven (written to sell a trust package whether the reader need one or not).

We started this site because the people we love deserve better content than that — and so do you.

The voice we aim for is documentary and plain-English: no pressure, no scare tactics, no sales pitch. We record what the law says, what things cost, what the deadlines and thresholds are, and where each fact came from. We do not tell readers what to do — that is the line we hold on every page.

Who we write for

Most people reading these pages are facing a money decision they’ve never made before — and didn’t choose the timing of. You’re usually one of two people:

You’re planning ahead. A homeowner, often in your 40s to 70s, frequently caring for both kids and aging parents, trying to get a will, a trust, or a funeral plan sorted so your family isn’t left guessing. You may have started and stalled, unsure whether you even have “enough” to need a plan.
Something already happened. Someone died, and you’re the one settling the estate, arranging the funeral, or figuring out what’s taxable — often grieving, often under time pressure, doing all of it for the first time.

Both of you share the same problem: a high-stakes decision, in a market full of sellers, with the prices and the rules hard to pin down. That’s who every page here is written for.

Why we’re different

The market we operate in is full of good-looking sites that all, ultimately, have something to sell you — an insurance policy, a $499 trust, or your own contact information resold to a sales agent who calls until you pick up. Funeral prices are notoriously hard to find (the FTC’s own 2024 undercover survey caught providers refusing to quote prices and giving different numbers on different calls), and the easiest way to make money here is to exploit that confusion.

We do the opposite, on purpose. We are a publisher, not a seller, and our value is structural neutrality: we publish sourced, dated facts and nothing else — no recommendations, no rankings by our own judgement, no verdicts. That is checkable on any page, which is the point; every competitor claims neutrality, and a claim is cheap. We take no affiliate commissions, no referral fees, and no sponsored content — and we never make money from capturing or selling your information.

What we cover

The site is organized into a few clusters:

Estate planning basics — what an estate plan is, what each document legally does, and the thresholds at which each one applies.
Probate — what it is, the statutory sequence, what it costs, and what passes outside it, with by-state guides for all 50 states.
Wills — execution requirements by state, what makes a will valid, and what courts have held invalidates one.
Life and final expense insurance — the contract terms each state’s insurance code requires, the underwriting terms carriers publish, and the standard coverage formulas with their publishers named. We state no premium: every price in this market is published by a seller, a seller’s agent, or a site paid to refer customers, and none of those is an independent source.
Funeral costs — NFDA cost figures by state and service type, and the itemized-pricing rights the FTC Funeral Rule grants.
What to do when someone dies — the procedural checklist, with each agency’s documented deadline and method.

Our editorial principles

These are the rules we apply to every page:

We document; we don’t advise. No recommendations, no verdicts, no “you should.” Where a rule or product only applies above a threshold or in certain states, we state the threshold and the states as fact — not as reassurance.
Everything traces to a source. Every meaningful number and legal rule has a named, dated source, and state-specific facts cite the statute. Where a figure has no qualifying source — what an attorney charges to draft a will, what a carrier charges for a policy — the page records that no source was found rather than stating a number.
We never invent a figure. If a state’s number can’t be sourced, the page records that it isn’t published. It never gets a plausible-looking guess.
We separate law from practice. A statutory fee schedule is law; an unattributed claim about what practitioners charge is not, and does not go on a page at all unless a named, dated, independent publisher states it.
We document disagreement. Where sources conflict or a rule is unsettled, we show both with citations rather than resolving it for you.
Plain English. No legal jargon without translation. Simplifying a statute into everyday words is documentation; telling you what it means for your situation would be advice, and we don’t cross that line.
A figure stays only if it is sourced. It stays if a statute sets it and we have read that statute, or if a named, dated, independent publisher states it and we have read that publication. A price published by a seller, by a seller’s agent, or by a site paid to refer customers is not an independent source. Where no qualifying source exists, the figure comes off the page and we say so — it is never softened into a wider range or an estimate.
Educational only. Every page carries an educational-only disclaimer. We don’t give legal, tax, insurance, or financial advice — we set out how things work so you can have a better-informed conversation with a licensed professional in your state.
No scare tactics. No fake urgency. No guilt. No invented horror stories.

For more on where the facts come from, see How We Research.

Our editorial team

Every guide on this site is researched, written, and reviewed by the Estate Planning Guide editorial team, working to a documented standard: every meaningful fact is traced to a primary source (state statutes, IRS and FTC guidance, NFDA and LIMRA data, state bar associations), cross-checked against established secondary sources, and dated so you can see how current it is. Where a fact may have changed since publication, we tag it for re-verification. The full standard — our source hierarchy, how we cite, and how we update — is on the How We Research page.

In the interest of transparency: we are an independent publisher, not a licensed law firm, insurance agency, or financial advisory, and nothing here is individualized advice or creates a professional relationship. For decisions specific to your situation, talk to a qualified professional in your state — our job is to help you walk into that conversation already understanding the terrain.

What we won’t do

Capture your phone number.
Sell or share your information.
Send you to a sales agent who works on commission.
Recommend products, or take payment from the companies behind them.
Tell you that you need a trust, or that you don’t.
Use scare tactics, guilt, or false urgency to push you toward decisions.

Corrections and feedback

If you find an error, a fact that’s gone stale, or a page that needs work, please let us know via the Contact page. Corrections are made publicly with a dated note at the bottom of the affected page.

Disclosures

The Site is independently published and displays advertising served through Mediavine. Advertisers do not influence what we write, and an ad is not a recommendation. We accept no affiliate commissions, referral fees, or sponsored content.

For our full legal disclaimer, see the Disclaimer page. For privacy practices, see Privacy.