Estate Planning: Wills, Trusts and Protecting What You Leave Behind
Signature Course No. 399 — A Signature AI Socratic Coaching Course.
No experience needed — your coach starts where you are.
A New Kind of Learning
Socratic coaching, delivered by an agentic AI coach.
Not a course you watch. An AI coach you work with.
The Lighthouse Coach begins by discovering how you think about the subject, teaches what is missing, and gives you realistic practice before asking you to prove that you can use it. You may test out of concepts you already understand, while capstones turn the learning into a practical plan, decision, conversation, or other real-world result.
The curriculum is deliberately authored; the AI delivers it through coaching. It is not an AI randomly generating lessons.
A coach that teaches by asking — not by lecturing
The Lighthouse Coach is an AI Socratic coach built on Cognosco Learning's Estate Planning: Wills, Trusts and Protecting What You Leave Behind course, in the Personal Effectiveness & Well-Being category. It does not play videos at you. It holds a conversation: it asks you a question, listens to your answer, names the misconception it hears, affirms what you got right, and asks the next question — the way a great coach works in the room.
Every asset travels to its next owner through exactly one controlling channel: the will through probate, a beneficiary designation, the way title is held, or a trust. Most people do not have an estate plan; they have estate documents — a will signed years ago, a form filled in at a bank, a name typed into an employer's benefits portal — assembled at different times, by different hands, never checked against each other. This course teaches you to see the whole system at once, on one running family — Walter and June Thornbridge, their adult children, and the house, accounts, and papers they accumulated over fifty years.
It starts with the inventory. Before any instrument is read, you will build the four-column inventory — asset, form, controlling channel, and destination as the papers stand — the document every later concept in the course, and both capstones, check against.
It works in two movements. First, Module 1 — The Transfer System: What Controls What — work through Concepts 1–9, finishing with The Thornbridge File: A First Estate Audit; then, Module 2 — The Stresses, the Taxes, and the Keeping — work through Concepts 10–18, finishing with The Second Thornbridge File: A Full Plan-Readiness Review.
Both capstones produce real artifacts — an Estate Audit Report for the Thornbridge file: the inventory, the channel traces, the contradiction list, and the fiduciary and gap assessment, closing with a questions-for-counsel page; and a Plan Readiness Dossier for the blended Thornbridge–Reyes household: the readiness inventory, the stress map, the tax and contract ledgers, and the living-file assessment, closing with its own counsel page in priority order.
The honesty standard is part of the course. This course is not legal advice, and it is not a substitute for a lawyer. Estate law is state law in most of the places where it touches your life, and figures that expire are taught as labeled illustrations, never as current legal facts. Every exercise analyzes a fictional family's papers; drafting, executing, and advising belong to licensed counsel in the relevant state.
The course is self-paced and always on — roughly 30 minutes per concept, about 9 hours in full, taken in as many sittings as you like. You can type your answers, or talk out loud: the Voice Coach speaks its questions and listens to your spoken replies. Learners who already know the material can test out concept by concept.
Estate Planning: Wills, Trusts and Protecting What You Leave Behind is part of The Lighthouse Signature Series — the online counterpart to the one-day, in-person learning Cognosco Learning has delivered since 2002.
Course Facts
One full concept, coached end to end — free: verify your email and we’ll send you a link to start.
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Diagnose → Learn & Practice → Prove → Capstone
Every learner moves through the same discipline a Cognosco instructor would insist on in the room.
Diagnose
The Coach starts where the course starts: with the inventory. Say which categories you would certainly miss if you had to list, today, every asset in a household you know well — and what that tells you about where that household's plan is actually blind; take one asset you own or know well and state whose name is on it and in what form, or name the gap; and say whether you picture the gross estate or the probate estate, naming one asset that belongs to the first but not the second. Every concept opens with three questions that locate where you actually stand, and your answers shape how deeply the Coach works the concept with you. Everyone begins with Module 1 — no skipping the foundations you only think you have.
Learn & Practice
Work each concept in conversation with the Coach — spoken or written — then practice it against realistic situations until it holds up.
Prove
Every concept ends in proof: answer the check cold and demonstrate the skill. Know it already? Test out and take credit immediately.
Capstone
Finish with two capstones — The Thornbridge File: A First Estate Audit for Module 1 and The Second Thornbridge File: A Full Plan-Readiness Review for Module 2 — that pull the whole course together, and earn the certificate.
What You'll Learn
Follow the asset, read the document, hand off well. Every skill in this course is worked on the same family file — the Thornbridge papers — so every channel trace, contradiction, and gap can be checked against facts you hold. A plan built on intentions is a plan built on fog; here, every destination is read from a document, and every illustrative figure can be recomputed from its stated assumptions.
Module 1 maps the transfer system. The Whole Estate; No Plan at All; The Will; Probate; Beneficiary Designations; Titles Decide; The Living Trust; The People Who Act; and Children in the Plan — the estate inventoried whole, each asset traced to the one channel that controls it, and the people who act scored from evidence.
Module 2 stresses, taxes, and keeps the plan. Papers for the Living Emergency; Letting Go or Holding On; The Tax Frame; Insurance in the Estate; The House and the Land; Debts, Digital Keys, and the Small Stuff; When Families Are Blended and Needs Are Special; Keeping the Plan Alive; and The Prepared Client and the Findable Plan — the incapacity file, the tax frame without folklore, and the review habit that keeps a plan matched to a life.
And it holds its boundary throughout. This course teaches understanding — the vocabulary, the map, and the judgment to read a plan and see where it is strong, where it is silent, and where it contradicts itself. It prepares you to walk into an attorney's office with an inventory and questions that have answers. It never advises you on your own estate, and no exercise asks you to decide what you should do with yours.
What you will learn
- Map any estate as a system: inventory the assets, and state which instrument controls each one
- Explain what happens with no plan at all — intestacy — and read a will for what it does and does not reach
- Trace an estate through probate, and judge when avoiding probate is worth doing and what it actually requires
- Audit beneficiary designations and property titles as transfer instructions that operate outside the will
- Explain how a living trust works, why funding decides everything, and how revocable and irrevocable trusts differ
- Evaluate the people named to act — executors, trustees, guardians, agents — and the incapacity documents that empower them
- Describe the federal estate and gift tax framework, read an illustrative tax computation, and recognize which figures must be verified as current
- Prepare for an attorney meeting with an inventory, a questions list, and a review habit that keeps a plan matched to a life
Everything in the course
- All 18 concepts of Estate Planning: Wills, Trusts and Protecting What You Leave Behind, in 2 modules
- A starting-point check first — the Coach finds where you actually stand before teaching
- Learn, Practice, Prove for every concept — no passive video watching
- A test-out on every concept: prove you know it and move on
- The Voice Coach: talk with the Coach out loud — it speaks, listens, and replies
- A personal Learner Record of your work across the course
- Two capstone exercises: The Thornbridge File: A First Estate Audit and The Second Thornbridge File: A Full Plan-Readiness Review
- A printable session summary whenever you pause
- The Lighthouse Coach completion certificate (Signature Series)
- Your progress is saved as you go — stop anytime, resume where you left off
Built for adults with anything to leave — and anyone named to act
Adults with anything to leave and anyone to leave it to — a house, accounts, a business interest, children, a partner — who want to understand their own papers before they pay to fix them; and adult children and named fiduciaries — the daughter named executor, the son holding a power of attorney — who have been handed a role and want to understand what the documents actually authorize.
Parents of minor children — for whom the central questions are guardianship and how money is held for a child, not tax.
People in second marriages and blended families — where the default rules and the old paperwork are most likely to defeat what everyone intended. This course assumes no legal background — only that you can read a document slowly, follow simple arithmetic when the assumptions are printed beside it, and hold two rules in mind at once.
Prefer to learn live and in person? The same material anchors Cognosco's one-day programs — browse the in-person catalog.
Start with The Whole Estate
$195 — introductory price. One payment. No subscription, no password to manage.
Here is exactly what happens when you enroll:
- Pay securely with Stripe — you are taken straight into the course
- Create your learner profile and begin the Module 1 starting-point check
- Save the access key you are given — it restores your enrollment on any device
- Learn at your pace; your progress is stored in your browser on your device
For the full voice experience, use Chrome and allow the microphone when asked. Typing your answers works everywhere, all the time. Questions before you enroll? Email hello@cognoscolearning.com.
Before you enroll
What is a Socratic coaching session?
A conversation, not a video. Your coach asks a question; you answer — out loud by voice, or by typing — and the coach responds to what you said: naming the misconception it hears, affirming what you got right, and asking the next question. You advance only when you have mastered each concept, so a finished course means the learning held.
How long does it take — and how long do I have?
About 30 minutes per concept. Learn in sittings of any length; your progress is saved as you go. You have a full year from purchase to finish, and you can revisit and retake within that year.
What does the certificate verify?
That you completed every concept and both capstones of this course. Anyone can confirm a Cognosco certificate online — enter its certificate ID on our verification page.
What if it isn't for me — what are the refunds?
If you have not started, cancel for a full refund within seven days of purchase. Once you have started, there is no cash refund — stop before finishing and we credit the full amount you paid toward any other course in the library (credit valid one year from your original purchase). Once you complete the course, no refund or credit applies.
More Signature Courses are coming
Estate Planning: Wills, Trusts and Protecting What You Leave Behind is Signature Course No. 399. Leave your email and we'll send you news of future Signature Courses and Lighthouse updates as they are announced — nothing else.