Help Build the Texas Estate Planning Readiness Report

Estate-planning statistics often describe national samples while Texas families, organizations, and educators need clearer local questions. WillBuddy is collecting a small, transparent set of readiness responses to explore which planning actions participants report completing and where they report gaps.

The project begins with disclosure, not a headline. No original Texas finding is published yet. The public Texas Estate Planning Readiness Report shows the survey, its collection status, sourced national context, and the rules we plan to follow before releasing an aggregate.

Important limits. This is a voluntary nonprobability convenience sample, not a representative poll of Texas adults. Results will not be weighted or generalized to all Texans. The survey is not legal research, does not review documents, and does not measure whether a participant's plan is legally valid.

Help by answering five questions

If you are an adult in Texas, you can answer the five-question readiness survey. It takes under a minute and does not require a WillBuddy account.

The five questions ask whether you report having:

1. a signed and current will;
2. a current signed document naming someone to handle finances if you cannot;
3. current healthcare decision-maker or care-wish documents;
4. primary and backup guardian choices when minor children are relevant; and
5. people who know where to find the plan.

Each question uses a small set of multiple-choice responses. The survey does not ask participants to upload, quote, or describe their legal documents.

This is different from the personal readiness tool

The research survey contributes answers to a future aggregate; it does not create a personal result. If your goal is to identify your own planning gaps, use the separate estate-planning readiness checklist. That tool generates an educational score, situation-aware checklist, and next actions without contributing those personal checklist answers to this research instrument.

Neither experience provides legal advice or determines whether a document is effective.

Who can participate

The intended participant group is self-identified Texas adults who voluntarily reach the report page. WillBuddy is not drawing a random sample from a complete list of Texas adults, sending probability-based invitations, or verifying residency through identity documents.

That recruitment method is a limitation, not a footnote. People who visit an estate-planning website may differ substantially from people who do not. People who choose to answer may also differ from visitors who skip the survey.

The American Association for Public Opinion Research's disclosure guidance calls for public survey releases to identify the collection strategy, sponsor and conductor, instrument, population, sampling and recruitment method, mode, dates, sample size, weighting, processing, quality procedures, and design limitations. WillBuddy is using that framework as a disclosure reference; it is not claiming AAPOR membership, certification, or endorsement.

What the survey does and does not collect

The survey records the five selected answer categories as an analytics event so complete responses can be counted in aggregate. It does not ask for or intentionally attach:

• a WillBuddy account ID;
• a name or email address;
• an asset, debt, or estate value;
• document text or an uploaded file;
• a street address or precise location; or
• the names of family members, guardians, executors, or agents.

Like the rest of the site, the page uses website analytics and may receive ordinary technical and attribution data described in the WillBuddy privacy policy. “Account-unlinked” therefore means the survey payload does not include the participant's WillBuddy account identity; it should not be read as a promise that no ordinary web request or analytics metadata exists.

Do not enter sensitive information into the survey. There are no free-text fields and no reason to provide document contents.

Publication thresholds

WillBuddy will not publish an original Texas aggregate until at least 200 complete responses have been collected. It will not publish a subgroup result containing fewer than 25 responses.

These are publication and privacy-minimization rules, not claims of statistical precision. A larger convenience sample can still be biased, and the thresholds do not create a margin of sampling error. AAPOR's best-practices guidance explains why nonprobability online samples require special care and transparent reporting.

What a future release should disclose

If the minimum threshold is reached and results are released, the report should state:

• the exact field dates;
• the questions and answer options used;
• the total number of complete responses;
• the recruitment surfaces used;
• whether duplicate, test, automated, or incomplete events were excluded and how;
• that the sample was voluntary and nonprobability-based;
• that the results were not weighted;
• that no margin of sampling error is claimed;
• which values are WillBuddy survey results and which are outside benchmarks; and
• any instrument or processing changes made after collection began.

If reliable deduplication or quality review cannot be documented, the report should say so rather than imply a cleaner dataset than exists.

How national context is kept separate

The report currently displays national figures from outside studies only as labeled context. Those studies use different samples, questions, dates, and methods. Their percentages are not combined into a Texas estimate and should not be compared as though they measured an identical construct.

Any future WillBuddy result will remain visually and verbally separate from outside benchmarks. Source links, sample sizes when available, and field dates belong next to the figures they describe.

What this research can be useful for

With appropriate caveats, a voluntary sample may help generate questions for future work, identify which educational topics participating visitors report struggling with, and show whether a more rigorous research partnership is worth pursuing.

It cannot establish the prevalence of wills, powers of attorney, directives, guardian nominations, or plan communication among all Texans. It also cannot establish the legal quality of a reported document. “Yes, current” is a participant's answer, not an attorney review.

How to contribute or inspect the methods

You can:

• answer the five research questions;
• inspect the live collection status and methodology;
• use the personal readiness checklist if you want your own next-step list; and
• read the privacy policy for the site's analytics and data-handling disclosures.

Participation is optional. Skipping the survey does not affect access to WillBuddy's educational content or free tools.

The standard we are trying to meet

The point of an open-method project is not to make a small dataset look authoritative. It is to let readers see how the answers were gathered, what was excluded, where bias can enter, and what conclusions the design cannot support.

If the project produces a useful aggregate, the methodology will remain attached to it. If the data cannot support a responsible release, the honest outcome is to keep the status as collection in progress or publish the limitation—not manufacture a Texas statistic.

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WillBuddy is not a law firm and does not provide legal advice. This survey collects self-reported planning-status categories; it does not review documents, determine legal validity, or provide a representative estimate of Texas adults.