The man was in his 80s, with terminal cancer, and his heart had stopped. Six family members stood around the bed. Half of them said he wanted to pass. Half said to do everything.
Somebody said there was paperwork. A DNR, a do-not-resuscitate order, somewhere in the house. Nobody could put a hand on it.
Jay Zigmont was the paramedic on scene. “Until they found the paperwork, it was up to me,” he says. So he went to work trying to resuscitate a man who probably didn’t want it, with a family arguing over him, because nobody could prove otherwise.
They found the DNR. He passed in peace. “But not without a lot of drama,” Jay says. “You could tell that all of his family loved him, but they all had a different perspective on what he wanted done.”
That was a man with six people in the room. Jay now spends his days on the people who have no one in the room at all.
Four years looking for an answer
Before he was a founder, Jay was a paramedic, then a healthcare executive, then a Certified Financial Planner. In 2021, he started Childfree Wealth, a financial planning firm for people without children. The question clients asked most had nothing to do with investments.
“Who is going to make decisions for me when I’m older?”
He couldn’t answer it. Not even for clients with more than $10 million. “The unfortunate truth is that if I couldn’t find a solution for people with 10s of millions, ordinary people were just out of luck.”
Jay says about 15 million childfree Americans over 55 don’t have a classic next of kin. Estate planning assumes that person is your kid. It took Jay four years to find a structure that could fill the role.
Taking on the liability nobody else would
Childfree Trust doesn’t just write documents. It becomes the person on them: medical power of attorney, financial power of attorney, executor and trustee, with a 24/7 emergency line behind it.
That is a lot of legal weight to carry for strangers. Jay’s team went through dozens of designs before settling on a partnership with Welon Trust, an independent trust company that serves in those roles. “We are the front end, they are the back end,” Jay says. He serves on Welon’s board and spent 18 months working with banking regulators to get the arrangement approved.
Then came the paperwork. Insurance “ranging from E&O to cyber, malpractice, and more.” Estate documents that hold up in all 50 states, when nearly every state has its own medical power of attorney form.
“I’ve spent more time with lawyers than I’d like to admit.”
The result costs $999 a year. TIME, which named Childfree Trust one of its Best Inventions of 2026 in the Social Impact category, noted that trust companies typically start at $10,000.
The call about Don
A financial planner sent them a client. We’ll call him Don. He’s in his 70s and has terminal cancer, and his biggest worry was his dog, Fred. Who takes care of Fred when Don can’t?
Every Childfree Trust plan includes a pet trust. Don’s friend will care for Fred. Childfree Trust manages the money so Fred is covered for life.
A month ago, the cancer hospital called. Don was in palliative care. The team faxed over his medical power of attorney and care documents, checked that the friend knew Fred needed care, and has taken a few more calls about Don since.
“Don knows we not only watch out for him but also Fred, and will take care of him after he passes,” Jay says.
Jay says 150 people have joined since Childfree Trust launched at CES in January. Those first calls were the point. “We needed enough people in the system to prove it works, and we needed to answer our first emergency calls.”
Where the AI fits
In September, the National Institute on Aging awarded Childfree Trust a $434,385 grant to build and test Autonomy-AI, a tool for long-term care and estate planning specifically for Childfree people.
Today, that planning happens with human financial planners, and that’s expensive. Jay’s bet is that AI can walk people through the same decisions those planners would, at little or no cost.
What it won’t do is decide anything.
“The AI isn’t making decisions for our clients. It helps clients think through the hard questions.”
His example: where does your money go if you don’t have kids? Ask your family and they’ll say your nieces and nephews. The tool is meant to slow that down and ask what actually matters to you, so the legacy is a choice and not a default.
Thirty days
Jay has been at this since 2021. Two books, a TEDx talk, and more than 1,000 press hits, he says. “Some days, I feel like I’m just yelling at the sky and making no progress.”
Then came one month. Jay counts a launch with Carson Wealth, which he says has more than 54,000 members, along with the NIA grant and the Trusts category win at the Wealth Management Industry Awards, against what he calls billion-dollar companies. He says they were also selected as a World Economic Forum UpLink venture. And TIME put them on its Best Inventions list, in the Social Impact category.
That last one hit hardest. “TIME putting us in the Social Impact category means they see what we are doing as so much more than an AgeTech/FinTech/HealthTech solution,” he says. “They see what we are really doing, which is fixing a broken system for the 25% of the US population who are Childfree.”
The goal now, Jay says, is 100,000 clients in five years.
The room
Jay is in the Fall 2026 Project Healthcare cohort at Nashville Entrepreneur Center. He came in asking for advisors who’d done category creation. He’s using them.
Pamela Wilson, an EC advisor, reviewed his marketing. One thing she said stuck: “At some point, you will have to move from creating a category to defending one.” Jay hadn’t thought about that yet.
David Frederiksen spoke to the cohort. Jay sent him the pitch deck afterward. David sent back three pages. “One of the most thoughtful memos I’ve ever seen,” Jay says, with feedback and hard questions about the company, the product and the approach. They’re meeting again.
His advice to the next founder through the door is blunt. “You need to be ready to put in the work. You need to know what you want out of the program, and you have to be willing to dig in.” He’s planning 5 to 10 hours a week with EC advisors. “It is time well spent.”
The paperwork
The night Jay worked that cardiac arrest, everything came down to a piece of paper nobody could find. Six people loved that man and still couldn’t say what he wanted.
Childfree Trust is built so the paperwork exists, the plan is clear, and when the hospital calls, someone picks up.
If you’re building for people the system forgot, the room Jay is working in is open. Applications for the Spring 2027 accelerators at Nashville Entrepreneur Center, including Project Healthcare, are open now. Programs begin in February. One application covers every program, and the EC takes no equity.
Apply for Spring 2027: ec.co/apply Project Healthcare: ec.co/accelerators/project-healthcare Childfree Trust: childfreetrust.com
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