By Carolyn Saxton, JD | Founder, Future Proof Plans | Managing Attorney, Saxton Law

I have been an estate planning attorney for a long time. And for most of that time, I have watched the same thing happen, over and over again, in a way I could not stop thinking about.

A family comes to me after a death. The estate is a mess. No will. No powers of attorney. No plan. And when I ask whether anyone ever told them to get one, the answer is almost always yes.

Their financial advisor had brought it up. Their accountant had mentioned it at tax time. A colleague had sent an article. The advice was everywhere. It just never became action.
That gap, the space between knowing you need an estate plan and actually having one, is where I have spent my career. And it is the reason I built Future Proof Plans.

What I saw from the inside

When families come to me after a loss, I see what the absence of planning actually costs. Not in the abstract. In real terms.

A spouse who cannot access accounts because no financial power of attorney was ever signed. A parent whose healthcare wishes are unknown because no advance directive existed. An adult child navigating months of probate court, spending money that should have been their inheritance on court fees and legal costs, because a will that would have taken an hour to complete was never completed.

None of it is unusual. And none of it is inevitable.

The families I work with are not careless people. They are people who received the advice, nodded, and then went home to a busy life and a to-do list that never seemed to get shorter. Estate planning felt like a project that required scheduling, consultation, paperwork, and money they were not sure they wanted to spend. So they deferred it. And the deferral became permanent.

That is not a character failure. That is friction. And friction is something you can fix.

What I built and why

Before law school, I studied accounting at Duquesne University. That background shaped how I think about legal problems. Estate planning, in my experience, is as much a financial issue as a legal one. Probate is not just a legal process. It is an expensive, time-consuming financial event that most families can avoid entirely with the right documents in place.

Understanding both sides of that equation is part of why, when financial advisors and CPAs started asking for a way to deliver estate planning inside their own practices, I understood exactly what they were asking for.

Future Proof Plans started as a platform for professional advisors.

Financial advisors, CPAs, HR consultants, and benefit professionals were asking for a way to deliver estate planning to their clients as part of their own practice, not as an outside referral that might go nowhere. I built the documents, the guided questionnaire, and the signing and funding instructions that made that possible. Every element reflects the same standards I apply in my own legal practice at Saxton Law.

Over years of building that system for professionals, my team and I learned something important: we knew exactly where the process breaks down, what questions families actually ask, and what steps they are most likely to skip. That knowledge is the foundation behind everything we built.

Now that same system is available directly to families.

The Essential Estate Plan gives individuals and couples the four documents every adult needs: a Last Will and Testament, Financial Power of Attorney, Healthcare Power of Attorney, and Living Will. State-specific. Completed through a guided online questionnaire, on any device, in under an hour. One flat payment. No subscription. Both spouses included at the same price.

The Complete Estate Plan goes further. It adds a Revocable Living Trust, a Pour-Over Will, Deed Templates for transferring real property, and asset-by-asset Trust Funding Instructions.

That last piece, asset-by-asset Trust Funding, matters more than most people realize.

A trust that is not properly funded does not protect your family from probate court. Most online services stop at the trust document. We include the funding instructions because they are what make the trust work.

A word to my fellow professionals

I know that some of the people reading this are attorneys, financial advisors, or other professionals who have questions about what it means for an estate planning attorney to offer a direct-to-consumer estate planning product.

Here is my honest answer…

The families who use Future Proof Plans are largely not the families who were going to hire an estate planning attorney anyway. They are the families who were going to do nothing. For those families, the choice was never between a professional plan and a self-directed one. It was between basic protection and no protection at all.

I believe, and I think most of my colleagues would agree if pressed, that a client with a self-prepared will and powers of attorney is in a meaningfully better position than a client with nothing. Not because every plan is equivalent to what a qualified attorney produces. It is not. Complex situations, blended families, business succession, significant assets, these require real legal counsel and always will.

But for the person with a home, a spouse, a retirement account, and two kids who simply needs to make sure their family is not standing in a courtroom eight months after the funeral, something is better than nothing. And right now, millions of those families have nothing.

I could not leave that gap alone.

Future Proof Plans is my answer to it.

What this is, and what it is not

Future Proof Plans is not a replacement for legal counsel when legal counsel is what a situation requires. It is not a shortcut for complex planning. And it is not designed to serve everyone.

It is designed to serve the families who have been putting this off. The people who know they need to do something and have not found a process that felt accessible. The couples who assumed they would get to it when things slowed down. The parents who would do anything for their children except, somehow, this.

For those families, Future Proof Plans was built to remove every reason to keep waiting.
An attorney built this so that you would not need one. The expertise is built into the process. The documents are the same quality. The only thing that changed is the way you access them.

If you have been meaning to take care of this, I am glad you found us. You can finish your estate plan today.

And if you work with clients who keep deferring it, I would be glad to talk about how Future Proof Plans might fit into your practice.

Either way, welcome.

Carolyn Saxton, JD
Founder, Future Proof Plans
Managing Attorney, Saxton Law
Charleston, South Carolina

Explore plans for individuals and families at FutureProofPlans.com

Future Proof Plans was founded by Carolyn S. Saxton, JD, a licensed estate planning attorney in North Carolina and South Carolina and the managing attorney of Saxton Law. The documents, questionnaire logic, and instructional guides that power Future Proof Plans were developed by Carolyn and her team. This post is informational in nature and does not constitute legal advice. For complex estate planning situations, we recommend consulting a qualified estate planning attorney.