How our recommendations work

No black box, no sales funnel. Here's the logic, and the promises behind it.

It's rules, not roulette

The Estate Gap Check is a fixed set of rules, written down in advance, that runs entirely on your device. It weighs the things that genuinely drive estate planning decisions: which of the five core documents exist, how long since they were reviewed, whether there are minor children, a blended family, a dependent with special needs, a business, and how complex the asset picture is. Your answers produce a status for each document and a ranked read on which gap to close first.

Because it's deterministic, the same answers always produce the same result. There's no AI judgment call deciding what to show you, and no algorithm optimizing for what earns us more.

The guardrails we've built in

Guardianship outranks everything. Minor children with no will is always the #1 gap, because nominating a guardian is the most consequential thing a will does for a young family.
The blended-family rule. A blended family with unreviewed beneficiary forms outranks every other gap except guardianship, because out-of-date beneficiary forms generally override what a will says.
Attorney routing is honest. Blended families, special-needs dependents, business owners, and complex estates are routed to "talk to an attorney", every time, even though online platforms are where our affiliate links live.
The trust is never oversold. A living trust renders as "worth considering" or "optional" based on your situation. We never call it "missing", because for many people it genuinely isn't needed.
Money can't touch the logic. Partners never see the rules, can't pay to change them, and the guidance text is identical whether or not an affiliate link exists for it.

Why the language is careful

Estate law is state law. Document names differ (living will, advance directive, healthcare proxy), intestacy formulas differ, and execution requirements differ. That's why our explanations say "generally" and "in most states", and why the result always routes document preparation to an attorney or a platform that builds state-specific documents. We describe the landscape; we don't draft the map.

Where the claims come from

The general principles we state (beneficiary designations generally overriding wills, intestacy defaults, what powers of attorney do) are widely established, pattern-level descriptions of U.S. estate law, deliberately hedged and kept free of state specifics, statistics, and dollar figures. Every factual claim on this site is tracked in an internal verification log before it ships.