Guides for decisions most people make once
ApplyTheGuide makes short, heavily researched guides for the decisions people tend to meet without a map. Each guide line covers one kind of decision, for one kind of reader, where they live, and ends with what to do next.
Every guide is built from checked sources, prepared for you and your ZIP code, and comes with a companion document your own AI can read, so the decision can be yours.
Pull a guide off the shelf, or use the arrow keys.
The guide lines
Each line answers one kind of question for one kind of reader and carries its own color. Care is open now and Homes is in research. The rest are planned in the order shown, and a line is published only when it meets the process below. Flip a card to see the questions it answers.
Long-term care explained for the people choosing it: in-home help, assisted living, memory care, nursing homes and hospice, with what to check where you live.
Buying, selling or renting a home when you have never done it: what the paperwork means, who pays whom, and what to check before you sign.
Buying, financing and keeping a car: what the numbers on the sheet mean, which add-ons to decline, and what a fair deal looks like in your area.
The everyday money decisions nobody teaches: the insurance you need, the accounts you do not, and what to do first when the picture changes.
Choosing a school, a program or a path for a child or for yourself: what the options are, what they cost, and how to compare them where you live.
Relocating across town or across the country: the order to do things in, what it really costs, and the steps people forget until it is late.
Know a decision that deserves a guide line? Say so in the contact form. Lines are chosen by how often people face the decision unprepared and how much good research changes the outcome.
What makes a guide ours
A search engine gives everyone the same page. A guide from us is prepared for one person, one place, and the assistant that person already uses.
A guide is prepared for you on the day you request it and arranged for your situation: planning ahead for yourself, or choosing for someone you love, on a timeline you set. What matters most to you comes first.
Rules, prices and providers change at the state line and again a few miles down the road. A Local Guide is built for your ZIP code and the area just around it, so the names, numbers and next steps are the ones you will actually use.
Every guide is written for a person to read, and comes with an AI companion document written for a model to read. Load it into the assistant you already use and ask about your own situation. The research is done, so your assistant does not have to do it.
Researching a decision like this with an AI from scratch means long sessions, many searches, and answers only as good as whatever the model happened to find. The companion document changes the job: it carries the checked facts, the local specifics and the structure of your guide in a form a model reads efficiently.
Example conversation. Your assistant's wording will differ; the facts it draws on come from the guide.
The process
The same process stands behind every line. Each statement here is true today or is a standing practice we hold ourselves to.
Every guide starts with regulations, government data and published research, and cites them so you can check for yourself.
Drafts are produced with several AI models and set against each other. Where they disagree, a person settles it against the source.
A claim that cannot be substantiated is cut, not softened. Nothing is published on a model's word alone.
Rules, prices and programs change at the state line, so guidance is local, down to the ZIP code where that matters.
We are paid by the reader, which keeps every guide on the reader's side. If anyone ever pays to be listed, they pay a flat, disclosed fee.
If a reader finds an error that is ours, they receive a corrected copy at no charge. Reader reports are how the guides get better.
Hyperlegible typefaces, print-friendly layouts and plain language, with WCAG 2.2 AA as the accessibility target.
Every guide comes with an AI companion document. Load it into the assistant you already use and ask about your situation; a free model is enough, because the research is already done.
Privacy policy
This page is short on purpose, because the site does very little with your information.
If you write to us, we receive the name, email address and message you enter. They go to our mailbox, are used only to reply to you, and are kept as long as the conversation needs them. Nothing from the form is added to a mailing list.
The form is protected by Cloudflare Turnstile, which tells automated senders from people without a puzzle. Turnstile runs only on this form and does not track you across sites.
This site sets no cookies. We count visits with cookieless, aggregate analytics that record which pages are viewed, not who viewed them. No advertising or tracking scripts run here.
We do not sell or trade information about you. The only parties that handle it are the services that host this site, run the human check and deliver our email, and only to do those jobs.
Each guide line, such as care.applytheguide.com, has its own privacy policy covering requests, orders and downloads on that site. This policy covers applytheguide.com only.
To see, correct or delete anything we hold about you, use the contact form and choose the topic "A privacy request". We answer every request ourselves.
Contact
Questions, corrections, Community Editions, privacy requests, or an idea for a guide line. We answer by email, usually within a few days.
The topic you choose routes the message to the right inbox, so there is no address to look up and nothing for a scraper to harvest.