The Elder Law Coach

Simplifying Family Document Chaos with Trustworthy CEO Nathaniel Robinson

• Todd Whatley

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Unlock the secrets to managing your client's family's essential information with the transformative insights from our special guest, Nat Robinson, creator of Trustworthy. Discover how this groundbreaking platform acts as a "family operating system," providing a secure and efficient way to organize, store, and share critical documents. Nat shares his personal journey to creating Trustworthy, inspired by the chaos families often face when handling important information. We explore how this innovative tool not only enhances security by avoiding privacy pitfalls but also streamlines the management of household equity and collaboration with loved ones and advisors.

Journey into the sophisticated world of document organization and security with Trustworthy's advanced AI features. Learn how the platform intelligently extracts key information, generates timely reminders, and provides concise document summaries—all while maintaining top-tier security protocols, including private cloud storage and two-factor authentication. We highlight the importance of preparing for estate transitions, offering insights on how Trustworthy can alleviate the stress of accessing crucial information during life’s pivotal moments. Whether you're planning for retirement or ensuring your family is ready for any emergency, this episode promises to equip you with the knowledge to utilize Trustworthy as a central hub for your family's needs.

To try out Trustworthy: https://trustworthy.com/#via=patty

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Speaker 1:

Thank you. Specialized experience, Whether you're an established attorney looking to refine your expertise or an emerging lawyer seeking a successful foray into elder law, this is your masterclass. Now let's get started with the luminary in the field. Here's Todd Whatley.

Speaker 2:

That's right. This is the Elder Law Coach Podcast and my name is Todd Whatley and, as always, I am very appreciative that you're here and thank you all for taking time out of your day to listen. And today I'm particularly excited because I have a guest, and it's with a new platform that I have started in my office that we have started giving to our clients and we've got some really good feedback from it, and I think it's going to make our clients' lives better, and their kids' lives particularly, and so please stay with us. But our guest today is Nat Robinson. Thank you for being with us, nat. How are you?

Speaker 3:

Yeah, I'm great Thanks for having me on today.

Speaker 2:

Okay, and I also have Patty and if y'all know me very well, she's my wife and she is here and she is my trustworthy expert in the office and she helps clients, she does trust funding and she helps clients get everything up to trustworthy, and so I think this is going to be a really good conversation, that I hope you guys can implement this with your clients and really, really make a difference. Okay, all right, so let's jump into it. All right, so now tell me kind of how did Trustworthy start? What happened in your life or what happened to say we need to create this product?

Speaker 3:

Yeah, I think there were a couple of big things. Our previous company had been acquired and I started a family. We had the birth of our now nine-year-old. It happened right around the same time. So the combination of those two things my dad brain sort of engaged and I was thinking beyond myself. I was thinking about legacy and what would happen to my family if something happened to me and started looking around and talking to folks as you do, like what do you do? You know how do you deal with this, these kinds of questions and quickly learned that most people had built some kind of what we call family operating system for themselves, using the tools at hand, using files, folders and cabinets, fire safe and all the digital equivalents that they felt comfortable with, from the phone, your iphone or the photos folder on your phone to google docs, spreadsheets, really anything you could imagine.

Speaker 3:

And we're surprised, you know some really impressive systems have been built, sort of ad hoc systems, and when we tried using those tools ourselves, we found that they fell short in some critical areas and it was honestly kind of crazy that every family had to build their own system. You know, we're 60 years into the information age. Families don't really have a system of record to manage their important family information. That sort of astounded us, and everyone was building their own system. But the big areas that the sort of off-the-shelf productivity systems fell short in were all started with a blank page. You had to remember exactly. You know what needed to go in there. You needed to build it and maintain it yourself. You had to do all the work yourself. There was nothing to help you or remind you.

Speaker 3:

The systems sort of the document systems were what we call dumb containers, meaning they didn't really know any information about the information that you were putting. They didn't have any intelligence and they couldn't offer a big return, one of the ones that you'll appreciate. Temporality If I share some information in a document, a Word doc or a spreadsheet, I can't say don't look at some of this information. I might not want you to know everything there is to know about my estate today. I might want to hold some of that back. So that was a big factor.

Speaker 3:

And then some of the business models and security around those systems weren't really ideal. You know this idea of like you're getting a free tool, but what are you really giving up in terms of sharing your information? Are you becoming the product with those kinds of tools. That didn't seem like a great equation when we considered putting our own information into a system like that. It wasn't a non-starter. So those are some of the big ones that were question marks for us, that we wanted to design around and, you know, build a system for families that could get them further faster, that they didn't have to create for themselves. So those were some of the big considerations in building something like this.

Speaker 3:

Really, at the heart of it is helping families be better organized, be better prepared for life and have access to all that important information today, on a day-to-day basis, but also during emergencies.

Speaker 3:

Okay, so what exactly does Trustworthy do way to store, access and share that important family information with loved ones and advisors, all the people in your ecosystem that you work with, that you collaborate with, that you might want to have access to a lot of, or some of, your information at the right moment.

Speaker 3:

So an example of that might be your spouse having access to everything and this idea of what we call household equity, meaning generally today, in modern households, there's this division of responsibility you manage one set of things, your partner manages another set of things, because of sort of this overwhelming nature of the amount of things that we have to deal with today.

Speaker 3:

So the ability to bring that whole picture together in one place is really key. And then you know be able to do that with lots of different stakeholders. So that could be, you know, a trustee or a guardian or adult child or a parent or siblings. You know in that sort of inner circle and then outwardly, to some of the trusted professionals that you work with, a wealth advisor, an estate planning attorney, daily money manager, business manager We've seen all kinds of folks be added to the ecosystems of different families and we, you know we're trustworthy as a company. We call what we've built the family operating system to allow you to keep track of all that information and all the related critical tasks and all of the folks that you might want to work with across your system.

Speaker 2:

Super cool because I do a lot of Medicaid applications and Medicaid wants to know everything about the person and so many times it's the kids coming in. I'm like, okay, we need about six months worth of bank statements, we need social security, we need all their investment stuff. And I just see their eyes roll up and they're like there's a file cabinet and we'll go through, and we'll spend half a day going through this file cabinet, or a number of file cabinets, trying to find what they need, or a shoebox or yeah, maybe it's. Hopefully it's in a file cabinet. Sometimes it's just dumped in a box and so, yeah, so having a place online that you can go to. So you mentioned that it's not just a dub, it's not just one place. Talk about how y'all use AI to help figure out what a document is and where it goes and where it segments within this platform.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, within the last year we considered the AI way that's taking over everything right now, and the right way to adopt some of that functionality within Trustworthy. Top of mind for us was how do we keep this private and secure to just your information, so that you're not sharing any information, we're not training the system on any of our member information and that it's sort of stateless and memoryless, meaning it's not holding on to any of that information. But what we've done is build a facility to help ingest your information very quickly and interpret it. So the feature that we built is called Trustworthy Autopilot and it basically understands different kinds of household documents so that when you ingest or upload something or take a screenshot using our mobile app, it will pull that into Trustworthy, into what we call the inbox, sort of like a holding area for everything, and then Autopilot takes over and says oh, what is this? Oh, this looks like a letter from insurance company, or this is a bank statement, or this is an ID, you know, like a driver's license or a passport or something, and it kind of knows, just looking at it, some cool things. It'll pull out all the relevant useful information, like the VIN number for your car and a car registration. It'll pull out salient expiration dates and create reminders for you so you know when things are going to expire, and it will notify you 90, 60, 30 days ahead of those expirations. It'll pull out any useful metadata that it thinks you might need to quickly get to. For example, in an estate plan it'll look at who are the benefactors or who are the trustees and guardians, who are the relevant players in this document, and then it'll create a summary of that document as well, so you can look at a couple of sentences about what is this document about and give you a quick analysis. It'll even make a recommendation for a better title.

Speaker 3:

Quite often, you know, you get documents that are like PDF ABC. It's not very useful for retrieving and searching against, so it'll help you get a better title, and all this in service of helping you create your system almost automatically. Once we've done all that, we sort of tell you hey, does this document relate to something you already have in Trustworthy, or do you need to create a sort of new place to put this? Because it understands the relationships and maps those relationships across the system. So, okay, this is a mortgage document that relates to this property that you've already created and trustworthy.

Speaker 3:

It should go, you know, in that property or in that financial entity and tell you where to put it Today. You know, we, we ask you to like double check it. You know, make sure that we get it right. Obviously, the system is still learning and improving over time, but ultimately we expect to be able to let you say OK, autopilot is doing a great job. I'm going to put this on full auto sometime later this year. We expect that'll be a capability where the system just organizes itself.

Speaker 2:

Wow. That's cool, that's cool.

Speaker 4:

So you were talking about the AI and how it isn't trained to recognize specific things. That's kind of one of the things that our clients have the biggest concern about is security. They don't want their information sold. They don't want anyone to be able to hack in and get access to it. I know that Trustworthy has a pretty stout security.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, that's a question we get a lot. Let's talk about AI. You know we don't use any member data. This is a big topical thing with AI being trained on public documents or copyrighted documents. We don't use any member information to train our AI. We use what's called synthetic documents, meaning, okay, let's create what a bank statement would look like. You know, AI is pretty good at generating, made up things. So we make up documents and that's how we train it so that when other bank statements come in, it sort of recognizes oh, this is a bank statement. So that's a really key part is not using any member data to inform it or build the system. I mentioned that it was sort of stateless, so that once it's created that analysis of your document, it's not holding on to any of that information. So that's a big factor as well. It's not sort of building a brain based on any one or any particular member information. The other way that we've implemented this is in a very secure private cloud, not just for AI, but across the system.

Speaker 3:

Security and privacy is paramount. We've built our business around and a business model around keeping your information private and secure. We're not letting you make it or asking you to make any trade-offs in that respect. Of course, we do all the things you'd expect around security. We ask that you create a robust password. You can't use 1234567 as a password. You have to create a robust password recipe. You have to have a two-factor authentication. This is a really critical step in securing your account, meaning that you have to verify when you log in that it's you logging in, then where you're logging in from using a second factor. So it could be a text message, could be biometric, could be something called a YubiKey, which is a hardware key attached that you have to physically touch and say you're present when you're logging in.

Speaker 3:

We use encryption across the whole experience, where everything's encrypted all the time. Probably the biggest thing that we have. That secret sauce is called tokenization and what it means is that we take the really secure information in your account, like your social security number, and we replace it with a hashed, encrypted key. The digits of your social security number are extrapolated out of the system to another server and replaced with a hashed key, meaning if anyone were to breach our system, they'd only ever be able to see that hashed key and not your actual social security number. And we do that for most of the information in your system. That's something that only we do, as far as I know, because it's expensive to implement this sort of tokenization, but when we considered putting our own information in Trustworthy, it was absolutely something we wanted to have.

Speaker 3:

The other big facet to our security is it's not just us. Don't take our word for it. We have third-party auditors every year audit the business practices and the systems and the training and everything that we do across the business. They're called controls. They come in an audit. This is part of the SOC 2 and SOC 3 compliance that we have and we've had flawless audits over the last couple of years. So that's a big part of sort of the validation of our security as well. We do penetration testing on a semi-annual basis. We have a bug bounty program, so reputable white hat hackers will try to penetrate the system and notice if they find anything that we can patch. So we've never had a breach. We have very robust security and privacy in place and we have lots of external people validating that constantly. If you want to know more about the technical considerations around trustworthy security, we have a link right at the top of our page trustworthycom. Forward slash security. There's a lot of as much technical detail as we can share without giving away the secrets.

Speaker 2:

Sure, wow, that's pretty cool. I mean, I think the older generation they just in general don't trust if it's not in their filing cabinet. If it's out there somewhere, they just generally don't trust it. I think anyone who understands security and technology would understand particularly the turning it into something else and then sending it and then turning it back into it is just that's high level security. And yeah, I'm sure that's expensive, but yeah, I think people who basically understand this under would know that that's pretty high level security.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, it's a, it's a fundamental part of our offering, so we've invested heavily in it and continue to do so. I think the bigger questions, todd, are, you know, beyond the security of the system. You know what are the sort of societal factors behind this. Why is this actually a good idea? And increasingly, you know sort of two big factors. One you know, not everything arrives in the mail anymore. Right, increasingly, this idea of digital transformation, things arrive in the email or as a link. So where do I store that information if I can't put it in the filing cabinet because it's in digital format already? And that was really a big consideration for us is how quickly is this taking hold? It's something we actually saw accelerate through the pandemic right Sure, where it sort of necessitated things to become more digital.

Speaker 3:

The other facet that I think a lot of people are thinking about right now is this idea of at least having a digital backup. What if there's a flood or a fire or a tornado or a hurricane or some other phenomena, you know, man-made or natural disaster? That would be great to have a digital backup of my important information, everyone's. You know we've been really focused on what's happening in LA with the wildfires. That's not an isolated event anymore, unfortunately. You know, wildfires are part of common consideration. It's crazy that it's happening in winter. It tends to happen more in summer, right when things are dry. But having a digital backup makes a ton of sense in a world of you know let's call it climate transformation where the intensity of these things are happening and the frequency of these things seem to be happening more and more often.

Speaker 2:

So you've implemented programs and Patty's gone through it, where you have what are y'all called.

Speaker 4:

Trustworthy Certified Experts.

Speaker 3:

Okay, patty's a Trustworthy Certified Expert. She's gone through the background check and the training, the online training that we have. That we have, and this is a program that was created really for a number of reasons, mostly for time or time successful time starved families or for elderly folks who are maybe a little less comfortable with technology and would like some assistance. So we have this national network now of folks who have gone through the background checks and the training to become a trustworthy sort of sort of and they're available to work with you or a loved one who would like to get everything set up and trustworthy. And quite often this is parents coming to us saying our parents left us a nightmare. We don't want to do that for our kids, right? Or kids coming to us saying, hey, we'd love to help. You know, we have this for our household, but we'd love to get this for our family, maybe our in-laws, and get them set up ahead of that inevitable estate transition.

Speaker 3:

How do we get everything dialed in so that the right people have access in the right moment and know where to go to find everything, because the alternative, as you probably know, can be a nightmare. We've heard all the horror stories of how long it takes to transition an estate. Not finding documents, not finding life insurance policies, having to open the mail, hack passwords, figure out where all the bills are and you know, pay all the bills and close all the accounts. It can be a real time-consuming task in a time that you don't. It's the last thing you want to deal with, right? So how do we help families get better organized and prepared for don't? It's the last thing you want to deal with, right? So how do we help families get better organized and prepared with those moments, but also the day-to-day moments as well?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, we've. You know, I kind of in some ways gave up on selling it to my clients. I was like, well, but then their kids really appreciate this, so it's. You may not get your client. If you're an elder law attorney, you may not get your client, or if you're one of our clients out there listening to this, you may not like it. But I promise your kids or your grandkids, depending on how old you are would love to be able to go to one place and find just and I hope everyone understands this is not just estate planning documents, this is everything. This is insurance. And, like we, we went to Italy this past summer and before we left I uploaded all of my credit cards, my passport, everything.

Speaker 4:

Insurance, all of it.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, so that if in pickpockets are huge in Italy and I was afraid if I got you know if I lost my wallet, it's gone and so I could just go into Trustworthy log in, bring it up and see everything I need to see, see the phone numbers I need to call to cancel my cards, and just I felt better knowing this was all taken care of and if if this does disappear, then I've got it covered and it's just so nice.

Speaker 3:

It's not surprising to me and I think travel is a great moment, sort of catalytic moment to sort of ask that question like are we prepared, are we organized? What if something were to happen? It happens especially with international travel, but even with domestic travel, like it just sort of flicks through your mind like I'm getting on a plane, you know something could happen. What if something were to happen? Would my family be okay? Would they know where to go to find the important documents? But there's lots of life moments. We talked about disasters. There's more common moments, like you know having a baby, getting married, all the way through life, retirement, changing jobs, life transitions.

Speaker 2:

You know these are all moments where it occurs to you to take stock of things and maybe increment your family preparedness. It's crucial. Have you seen, have you worked with other attorneys, how are other attorneys using this or what are some interesting ways that this is being used?

Speaker 3:

Yeah, I think I mean across the spectrum. Certainly, estate planning attorneys look at trustworthy as a way to add value to their client experience, but also as a way to deliver those important documents, the estate planning documents. We have a whole category for legal, really focused around estate planning documents, healthcare provisions, powers of attorney, all the things that you would help your clients with and it's a great way to deliver those documents, at least in an online form or digital format, so they know where to go. Also, that you end up being a collaborator in their system, so you're present if they want to make changes or alterations or version their documents, which happens more frequently than people realize as things change across life.

Speaker 3:

I know my example right now, I'm, I have a out-of-date estate plan that I urgently need to get updated. So I'm, I'm, I'm a part of the problem here as well. But, uh, you know, those, those kind, those are the considerations of like, hey, we're not just delivering your documents, we're giving you this family operating system. Having your estate planning documents in there is critical, but there's all the other things that you mentioned across IDs and insurances, and property and heirlooms and all the other things that families care about, that they want to build kind of this treasure map to and I'll point out that not everything has to be in trustworthy right. You could have a safety deposit box or a safe somewhere. You just want to let someone know where those things are. So it kind of has the treasure map, as we say, to where things are and how you unlock the instructions, even operational instructions, for, oh, I pay for my mom's healthcare or I pay for my mom's mortgage or something like that that the other family members may not know about.

Speaker 2:

Interesting Anything else we need to discuss.

Speaker 4:

I'd like to point out that it's very good in that you can kind of make it what you want to be. You can put your own categories, like your you know for your pets and you know just any, anything that you want to keep track of or have someone else have the ability to see if it needed to be taken care of if you weren't able to. It's just kind of what you make it. It's good. It's good.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, we've created this normalized organization system because we've talked to thousands of families and learned what is common across all families and so, as you say, patty, we have sort of some structure. But you can make it your own and make it flexible to your needs. And we work with all kinds of professionals as well. You probably work with some wealth advisors, some tax professionals or accountants, you know, common insurance brokers, realtors, you know we work with all of those folks and they can all be collaborators in your system as well and let your professionals, you know, exchange information as needed. Sorry.

Speaker 2:

Man, I'm sick and I hate it. Sorry about that. So, okay, man, once I saw it, I fell in love with it and I thought, man, this is something we can definitely use, and so I'm a big fan and I appreciate everything that y'all do. I think you have an excellent product, and you mentioned one thing that the total automation. Are there any other cool things that you see coming in the future?

Speaker 3:

Yeah, well, one of the cool things that's coming that's been highly requested is an Android app. We haven't had an Android app for a while. It's a couple of weeks away from being delivered. It's really close now. We're really happy to deliver on that promise for Android users today that having that had to use the desktop or the mobile web experience which is not quite as good, not quite as native to their operating system. So really excited for that. That's coming soon. And then another thing that's coming this year we are creating a medical category. It's sort of the big missing category that we haven't provided for and that's relevant for a lot of folks who want to keep track of having dental vision, medical all in one place Usually they're separated Keeping track of all the records, keeping track of all the medications and quite often for folks who are looking after a loved one needing to keep track of all that information for a special needs person or just a loved one who's sick.

Speaker 2:

Very cool. Okay, good deal. All right, nat, I appreciate your time today and I just want to get your information out to the masses because I love it and I think it's fantastic, and so there will be a link in the show notes that you can click on and that will take you into Trustworthy and get you the program. Let's go and talk about prices. I mean, for my legal clients, we include this with our stuff, but if someone is just interested in going directly to you, how much is this?

Speaker 3:

Yeah, well, it's good timing. We just actually released a completely free plan in January. So if you have some limitations but that's a great way to get started there's no timeline or time limit. You can use that free plan forever. Hopefully, you get to a point where you're like, oh, this is great, we're really using it and you want, you want to upgrade, to get more capacity. Really, uh, and that's ten dollars a month. Uh, you pay annually, but it's just ten dollars a month. That's crazy. That's a. That's the sort of the silver plan. And then the gold plan is if you have a business, if you have a family business, uh, you want to keep track of all your business filings and uh, paperwork. Um, then that's $20 a month, paid annually.

Speaker 2:

That's a good price. I mean that's incredible For all that you get and to be organized. That is very I think that's very economical. So thank you.

Speaker 3:

We definitely wanted to be, you know, available to as many folks as possible. The other thing that we provide if you're a hero or a first responder includes, you know, all the usual folks, as well as teachers and medical professionals. We offer you a 50% discount on that subscription. So try to do the right thing for the heroes that help society, help our society and our communities on a daily basis. Good job.

Speaker 2:

Okay, I like your company, I really do.

Speaker 3:

I like your company.

Speaker 2:

I wasn't asking for a compliment. I just truly I think y'all are doing a fantastic thing and I appreciate it and I want to help every way I can. So, all right, Nat, thank you very much. Have a great day, and we'll get you back on here sometime later when some new features come out and remind folks about Trustworthy.

Speaker 3:

All right, sounds great. Thanks, todd, thanks. Patty Great to see you, thank you.

Speaker 1:

Thank you for joining this episode of the Elder Law Coach Podcast. For those eager to take their elder law practice to new heights and are interested in Todd's acclaimed coaching program, visit wwwTheElderLawCoachcom. With Todd Whatley by your side, the journey to becoming an elder law authority has never been more achievable. Until next time, keep learning, keep growing and stay passionate about elder law.