What does my mastermind agreement need to say about refunds, and can I really say no refunds?

Yes, you can sell a mastermind seat with no refunds, and the clause is generally enforceable in the US as long as the buyer saw it and agreed to it before the card was charged. What you cannot do is bury it, contradict it in your sales page, or rely on it to stop a chargeback. Those are three separate systems, and the contract only governs the first one.

The practical order of authority looks like this. Your agreement governs what you and the member owe each other. State consumer protection law can override parts of that agreement, particularly around cancellation windows and automatic renewal. And the card networks, Visa and Mastercard and their peers, run a dispute process that does not care what your contract says unless you can produce evidence inside their timelines.

So the real question is not whether you may write "all sales are final." It is whether your disclosure, your enrollment record, your billing descriptor and your marketing language will hold together when one member of eight decides at month four that this was not what she expected.

What a client agreement must disclose before the first charge

Disclosure before payment is the hinge. A term the buyer never saw is a term you will struggle to enforce, and under the FTC Act an omission that misleads a reasonable consumer can be treated as a deceptive practice on its own.

At minimum, put these in front of her before the checkout button, not behind a link she has to hunt for:

• The total price, and if there are installments, the number of payments, the amount of each and the total she will have paid at the end.
• The term of the commitment: six months, twelve months, or cohort length, with actual start and end dates.
• What is included: number of group calls, hot seat frequency, whether one to one time is part of the seat, what happens to recordings.
• The refund and cancellation position, in plain sentences, in the same visual weight as the price.
• Whether billing continues automatically after the initial term, and exactly how she cancels.

Then keep the record. Timestamped checkbox acceptance, the version of the agreement she accepted, her IP, the email confirmation she received. A signed PDF is fine. A "she clicked something in June" is not.

The two documents problem

Most disputes I have seen start because the sales page and the agreement disagree. The page promises a bonus strategy session; the agreement lists only group calls. When those conflict, expect a court or an arbitrator to read the ambiguity against the drafter, which is you. Reconcile them every time you change the offer.

Keep reading: How do I run a hot seat so the member leaves with a decision instead of a pile of advice?

No refund clauses: where they hold and where disclosure rules bite

A no refund clause is strongest when three things are true: the buyer is a business buying a business service, the disclosure was conspicuous and pre purchase, and the service actually started. Group programs sit in a good position here because the seat is genuinely scarce. You held it, you turned away another applicant, you set the group size around her.

It weakens fast in a few situations. If the seat was sold with an urgency claim that was not true, the clause is not the problem, the misrepresentation is. If you cancel a cohort or materially change the format, a no refund clause does not cover your own non delivery. And if you sold to a consumer rather than a business, several state statutes may apply that would not touch a business to business sale.

A more defensible structure than a flat no is a stated, narrow remedy. For example: no refunds after the first live session; a pro rata credit toward a future cohort if you cancel; a documented transfer of the seat to another approved member with your consent. That gives you a reasonable answer to offer instead of a fight.

State level cancellation and cooling off rules that can apply

There is no general federal right to change your mind about a purchase. The FTC Cooling Off Rule is narrow: it covers sales of $25 or more made at your home, workplace, or a temporary location such as a hotel meeting room, and it gives three business days to cancel. That matters if you sell seats in the room at a live workshop, which many facilitators do.

Beyond that, look at your own state and the states your members live in. Several states regulate "seller assisted marketing plans" or business opportunity sales, and the definitions can be broader than you expect if you advertise income outcomes. California, for example, has a statutory cancellation right for certain contracts signed away from the seller's usual place of business, and California and New York both regulate automatic renewal aggressively.

None of this means a coaching mastermind is a regulated school. It means the categories are defined by what you promise, not what you call yourself. If your marketing sells a method for making money, you have moved closer to the business opportunity rules than a coach who sells facilitation and peer accountability.

Keep reading: How did one coach fill eight paid seats without an audience, using only referrals and one live room?

Card network chargeback windows and what evidence wins one

A chargeback is not a lawsuit and your agreement is not the deciding document. The cardholder files a dispute with her issuing bank, usually under a reason code such as services not provided or not as described. Cardholders generally have 120 days from the transaction or from the expected service date to file, and the clock on a subscription runs per charge.

Your processor gives you a short window to respond, often seven to ten days. What actually wins:

• The signed or clickwrap agreement with the refund terms visible, plus proof of acceptance date.
• Attendance records showing she joined calls, and on which dates.
• Delivery evidence: recording access logs, workbook downloads, the hot seat she took on a named date.
• Correspondence showing she was satisfied, or that you offered to resolve the issue.
• A billing descriptor that matches the brand she bought from, so she recognized the charge.

Attendance history is the single most persuasive item and the one most facilitators cannot produce. "She was on eleven of twelve calls" answers "services not provided" better than any clause you could draft.

The economics of fighting

Assume a $500 monthly seat and a $15 to $25 chargeback fee that you pay whether you win or lose. If your dispute rate stays low, fighting a $500 charge is worth the twenty minutes it takes to assemble evidence you already have. If assembling it takes two hours of hunting through Zoom exports and email, the math changes. That is an argument for keeping the records automatically, not for surrendering.

Installment plans, defaults and collecting the remaining balance

Installments are where good agreements earn their keep. Say plainly that the price is the total, and that paying it in installments is a convenience, not a month to month subscription she can stop. Then define default: a failed payment, a stated cure period of, say, ten days, and what happens after.

Work the arithmetic in front of her. A $9,000 seat paid as $1,500 at enrollment and six payments of $1,250 totals $9,000. If she stops after payment three, the outstanding balance is $3,750. Your agreement should state that the full balance becomes due, that access is suspended during default, and whether you will accept a revised schedule.

Structure	What you can collect on default	Practical risk
Pay in full	Nothing outstanding	Highest chargeback exposure on one large charge
Installments on a fixed total	Full remaining balance, if stated	Requires clear acceleration language
Month to month membership	Current month only	Seat revenue is unpredictable; easy to cancel

Keep the card on file with authorization language that survives the failed payment, and set retries deliberately. Chasing three members by text every month is how facilitators lose their Tuesdays.

See how MastermindSeats handles this for group coaching and mastermind facilitation

Autorenewal disclosure and cancellation requirements under federal and state law

If a seat renews automatically, treat it as a regulated subscription. The federal ROSCA rules require clear disclosure of the terms before you obtain billing information, informed consent to the recurring charge, and a simple mechanism to stop it. State automatic renewal laws, notably in California and New York, add specifics: conspicuous presentation of the renewal terms, an acknowledgment the customer can retain, advance notice before renewal for longer terms, and a cancellation path that is at least as easy as the signup path.

In practice that means three things. Send a renewal reminder before you charge. Let her cancel without a phone call if she enrolled without one. And keep a copy of what she was shown at signup, because "our page said so" is not evidence.

Results language that turns a coaching contract into a legal problem

The fastest way to lose a refund argument is to have promised an outcome. "Members typically add six figures" is a claim you must be able to substantiate with real, representative data, and testimonials that show atypical results require clear disclosure of what a typical result actually is.

Say what you deliver, not what she will earn. You deliver twelve facilitated sessions, a hot seat rotation, a peer group of vetted founders, and accountability between calls. Whether she uses it is hers. Put an explicit no guarantee of results paragraph in the agreement, and then make sure your emails, your live workshop and your sales page do not quietly contradict it.

Where to put your attention next

The clause is the easy part. What decides these situations is whether you can show, on demand, what she agreed to, what she paid, and what she attended. That is a records problem, and it is worth solving before you need it.

MastermindSeats keeps the enrollment record, the recurring billing schedule and the attendance history attached to each seat, so the evidence for a dispute or a balance owed is already assembled. Get your agreement reviewed by a lawyer in your state, then make sure your system can prove every date it references.