What this app can and cannot do.

We are not a law firm

As U Wish is a software company. It is not a law firm, it does not employ attorneys to advise you, and nothing it produces is legal advice. Using the app creates no attorney-client relationship, and no confidentiality of the kind that relationship would bring.

The documents the app prints are templates, filled in with what you told it. They have not been reviewed by a lawyer for your situation, in your state, under your family's circumstances — because nobody at As U Wish knows any of those things.

A memorandum is not a will

The document As U Wish prints is a personal property memorandum: a list of tangible belongings with the name of the person you would like each one to go to, and space for why it mattered.

It is designed to sit alongside a will, usually referred to by the will, rather than to replace one. On its own it does not carry the authority of a will, it does not dispose of money, property or accounts, and it does not appoint anyone to act for you. If you do not have a will, this document is not a substitute for getting one.

The rules differ where you live

Whether a memorandum of this kind is recognized, and what it must contain to be given effect, is a matter of state, provincial and national law. Depending on where you are:

• Your will may need to refer to the memorandum expressly for it to have any effect at all.
• Signatures, dates or witnesses may be required, in a particular form.
• The list may be treated as guidance to your executor rather than a binding instruction.
• Certain categories of property may not be able to pass this way.

As U Wish does not tailor the document to your jurisdiction and cannot tell you which of the above applies to you.

What the page fingerprint proves, and what it does not

Each printed page carries a code generated from the contents of the document. If the document is altered, the code no longer matches, and you are able to tell. That is the whole of what it does, and it is worth being exact about the limits:

• It shows that a document changed. It does not show who changed it.
• It does not prevent anyone from altering a copy. A determined person with professional PDF software can alter a document; the fingerprint is how you find out.
• It is not a signature, not a notarization, not a certification, and not evidence a court is obliged to accept.
• It only helps if you kept a note of the original code. Nothing checks it for you.

We describe the document as tamper-evident, and we mean the narrow thing that phrase says: evidence of alteration, after the fact. We deliberately do not describe it in stronger terms, because stronger terms would not be true, and a family relying on a promise the app cannot keep is the worst outcome we can imagine.

Recordings and transcripts

A voice note or a video message is a message to your family. It is not a legal instrument, and it does not amend your will or your memorandum, whatever it says.

Where the app prints a transcript, that transcript is produced by automatic speech recognition and may contain mistakes — names, places and family words especially. Read it before you rely on it. The recording is the record; the transcript is a convenience.

No guarantee of any particular outcome

Nothing here is a promise about what will happen to your belongings. Families disagree, executors interpret, courts decide, and laws change.

What As U Wish does is make your wishes clear, specific and easy to find, in your own words, while you are still here to explain them. That is worth a great deal. It is not the same as making them enforceable.

Estate and tax matters

As U Wish does not calculate estate, inheritance or gift tax, does not advise on giving things away during your lifetime, and does not consider how a transfer might affect benefits, means testing or anyone's tax position. Those are questions for an attorney or an accountant, and they are worth asking before you give away anything of real value.

Please have it reviewed

An hour with an estate attorney, with your printed memorandum already in hand, is the single most useful thing you can do with what this app produces. You will have done the slow part — the remembering, the deciding, the writing down — which is the part no attorney can do for you, and the part that usually never gets done at all.

Take the paper to someone qualified. Ask them what your state requires. Then keep the signed version somewhere your family will find it.

How to reach us

Write to asuwishcustomerservice@gmail.com.