FAQs

"Cake" may not be the first word that comes to mind when you think of end-of-life planning, but we chose it because it's a warm, inviting symbol of celebrating and honoring life. Proactive planning is a considerate and generous act that honors our lives and the lives of those we love. Planning also encourages us to reflect on our final wishes, which can help us live more purposefully and meaningfully in the present. When we think deeply about what's most important at the end of life, we understand what's most important now, and can better appreciate our relationships, celebrate accomplishments, and realize our goals in the precious time we are given.

If you're exploring your mortality, grieving a loss, or contending with the end-of-life for yourself or a loved one, Cake is for you. Cake is particularly helpful for anyone who wants to:

• Learn about end-of-life, loss, and living fully
• Make sure their wishes are known and followed
• Get guidance on what planning they should do
• Know if the planning they have already done is sufficient
• Unburden their loved ones from having to make these decisions for them someday
• Help their aging parents plan
• Protect their children or spouse should anything happen to them
• Protect their adult dependents should anything happen to them
• Have more peace of mind and perspective

Each and every one of us should have a say in how we live our lives, from beginning to end. Gift your loved ones with the information they will need someday to make it easier on them.

We always offer a free version of Cake because our primary goal is to help as many people as possible to successfully complete their end-of-life planning.

We make money by promoting our affiliate partners who offer services and products that our users will appreciate, and by working with enterprise partners to create versions of Cake configured especially for their needs.

Your trust is the most important thing to us. We will never sell or share personally identifiable information (PII) with any 3rd party. We are committed to protecting your privacy and security, as outlined in our Privacy Policy and Terms of Use.

Yes and yes! The Cake team takes your security very seriously. We are HIPAA compliant, employ bank-level security, and all of your data is protected in transit and at rest with 256-bit AES encryption and 2048-bit certificates. Cake is GDPR compliant for our European users, which simply means we abide by strict European Union rules for handling, protecting, and allowing users to manage their own data. We are trusted by organizations like Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts, Harvard Pilgrim Health Care, and the City of Boston.

Your profile and answers are completely private to you and only you by default. This means that we only share your data with people that you choose to share your profile with. We recommend that you share your profile with the important people in your life; that is how you get value out of your Cake profile. Your planning is only helpful if your loves can access it. You can always “unshare” your profile if your preferences or your relationships change.

Cake does not sell or share personally identifiable information (PII) with any 3rd party. We are committed to protecting your privacy and security, as outlined in our Privacy Policy and Terms of Use.

Where applicable, Cake guides you to create important legal documents to protect your end-of-life wishes.

Legal healthcare documents
We help you understand which healthcare documents you need to create, where to find them, and how to complete them:

• Health care proxy
• Living will (some states combine the two under one document)

Once your document is legal by your state's standards, upload it to Cake for safekeeping and sharing.

Legal wills
We help you prepare to create a will by asking the important questions to get you thinking about the dependents and all of the assets you would need to protect. You can use your answers to have a more productive, informed will writing session witha lawyer or estate attorney. Once your will is complete, upload it to Cake for safekeeping and sharing.

Decisions that don't need to be "legally binding"
Not all end-of-life decisions need to be in legal documents to come true. For example, if you want to play Beyonce or Fleetwood Mac at your funeral, your loved ones just have to know about it for them to carry this out. The most important thing for these types of decisions is to make sure they are known so that they can be honored. As you answer questions on Cake, we generate documents that record your wishes for things like funeral, memorial, legacy, and pet care decisions. While these planning documents don't need to be legally binding, they provide invaluableguidance to your loved ones to carry out your wishes and honor your life in the way that is most true to who you are.

Partnering with Cake can help organizations achieve myriad objectives. The tool can help organizations that offer financial planning tools and/or insurance products to deliver additional value to their customers, attract new customers, cross-sell related products, and enhance customer perceptions of the organization. For healthcare organizations, the tool can drive completion of advance directives and other key end-of-life planning information and make the information easily accessible to care teams, family, and friends so that end of life preferences can be honored.

Our enterprise clients recognize the importance of end of life planning to their business and stakeholders. Cake can partner with organizations in many ways, depending on the specific needs. Current customers have offered co-branded or whitelabeled end-of-life planning tools to their audiences, either as a value-add to current customers or to attract new customers and to ensure customer preferences are honored.

The Cake team has spent hundreds of hours consulting with experts to develop our content and decision making tools. We've worked closely with palliative care physicians, social workers, wealth managers, estate attorneys, and funeral planners. We aim to break these tough topics down into simple, bite-size decisions to make planning easier on you.

Rest assured, you will not lose any planning you do with Cake! We greatly value the trust our users place in us to keep their plans safe and secure for the long term. That said, we understand the concern some people may have about saving their end-of-life plans online with a company. We are committed to protecting the information in your profile, no matter what the future holds. You own all of the personal information in your Cake profile, and you can download or print your planning at any time. In the event Cake would need to cease operations, we would ensure our users receive access to a copy of their plan for printing or digital safekeeping elsewhere.

A will is a great start! However, there are many end-of-life preferences that a standard will does not always address. Many of our users already have a will, but still find enormous value from Cake. We help you think through the personal, human preferences that a will may overlook:

• Detailed wishes for end-of-life medical care
• Ideas for a more personalized and comforting funeral
• Ideas for unique ways to memorialize someone
• A digital asset plan (e.g., social media, online accounts, etc)
• Continued care plan for pet(s)

Not caring what happens after you die is a totally valid preference! You can use Cake to make sure your loved ones know that you don’t care so they are free to make their own decisions. This can spare them conflict and difficult decisions. You can also use Cake to explore other aspects of end of life that you might not have been aware of and may have an opinion about.

Yes! No matter what planning you've already done, you'll find value in using our planning tool to explore a number of ideas and options other resources may not have presented to you. We'll also help make sure you've thought of everything.

This is especially helpful if you've done planning on paper, as a lot of offline planners worry that their paper documents might not be found by family when they are needed. For example, will your family remember that you have a binder or packet of documents in the desk?

Think of Cake as an online binder for all of your current end-of-life wishes and documents. Any planning you've done can be uploaded to Cake profile for safekeeping and sharing!

We completely understand that thinking about death can be challenging. We guide you on how to get started and enable you to go at your own pace and plan as much as feels right to you. For many of our users, thinking about the end of life can be a motivating factor to live life to the fullest. It can put things in perspective and give you and your loved ones more peace of mind. Take a few minutes to complete Cake cards, reflect, and talk to the people who matter to you--planning is a very considerate act that comes from love and a desire to honor life.

No. Cake is web app, which means you do not need to download anything. You can access and manage your Cake account by logging into our website (joincake.com) from any web browser on your phone, tablet, or computer. For now, Cake cannot be used offline.

We think the best way to do this is to first familiarize yourself with the Cake planning process. Next, set aside some time to sit down beside your loved one and walk them through the process in person.