Trust & Will offers free will services for teachers

For all of us, this has been a trying time. But for teachers, it’s been especially hard. This spring, when the pandemic kept them apart from their students, they powered through by learning an entirely new way of teaching. Over the summer, they navigated the uncertainty around the highly contentious topic of whether students should return to class at the start of the school year. And now that fall is here, many of them are juggling online learning with teaching in-class students, sometimes both at once. And they are doing so at great personal risk — many teachers are in at-risk categories, and even the best safety precautions can’t fully prevent the risk of contracting or spreading the coronavirus.

In other words, they’re very much as heroic as the front-line workers who have bravely risked their health to help others. That’s why our partners at Trust & Will are now offering free will services to teachers. It’s a way of saying thank you to the hard-working educators who are there for our kids.

If you’re an eligible Haven Life customer, you might be familiar with Haven Life Plus — a rider full of low- or no-cost services, including things like an annual subscription to the fitness app Aaptiv and estate planning services from Trust & Will. (And if you’re not a Haven Life customer, well, maybe get a free quote for term life insurance and go from there.)

The service offered free to teachers is the same as one of the options Plus members can choose from — will-based estate planning, in which you can create a legally binding will online in just 15 minutes.

Teachers who sign up at Trust & Will get a will, either for themselves or for themselves and their partner, along with a suite of other essential documents. As Trust & Will’s head of marketing, Katie Fellenz, explains, “It’s a comprehensive estate plan. The will says who you want to leave your assets to, who you want to be guardians for your kids — even for your pets. There are also important healthcare documents such as HIPAA authorization, which gives permission to share your sensitive health care information with whoever you designate; financial and medical power of attorney; and your living will, which is basically your medical wishes at the end of life.”

Taking care of those long-term financial planning needs, like getting a will or even getting life insurance, might seem impossible to handle amid the stress of Fall 2020 — especially for teachers, who are already managing a bunch of hangry kids on a Zoom call and then working through the night to review those students’ tablet assignments. That’s what makes Trust & Will’s initiative so timely for any kind of educator.

Trust & Will service takes care of most end-of-life planning in one go. Emotionally, that’s a big weight off a person’s shoulders, which is why Trust & Will wanted to offer it free to teachers. “When the pandemic was at its peak in March and April we had a ton of health care workers, who were putting their lives on the line, coming to our website and asking about will options, so we just decided to offer our service to them for free, to help alleviate some of their stress,” Fellenz says. “As back to school has approached, teachers have also had a similar kind of worry, so we hope to alleviate some of that. This is our way of saying, ‘Thank you for what you’re doing, we know you’re taking care of our children, trying to keep them safe and you have this added stress, so we wanted to make this one less thing you have to worry about.’”

Interested, or know an educator who might be? Here’s how it works: Visit this page at the Trust & Will site, where you can easily enter your credentials, then can carry on with making a will like any other customer (i.e., quickly and painlessly), and free of charge. “Trust & Will is going to offer estate planning free to teachers through the end of the year, then it’ll transition to a discount,” says Fellenz. So if you’re a teacher who’s been putting off this particular piece of homework, now’s a great time to get it done.