A New Way to Measure Estate Planning Readiness

Ohio

LegacyGuard Estate Planning is trying to make the answer more precise.

The company is launching the Legacy Readiness Assessment, a new consumer assessment designed to evaluate multiple parts of an estate plan and produce an overall Legacy Readiness Score.

Instead of stopping at whether someone has a will or living trust, the assessment looks at how different parts of a plan fit together, including legal authority, assets, family protection, plan maintenance and coordination.

The idea grew out of a problem LegacyGuard says it kept encountering.

Someone could have several estate planning documents and still have unanswered questions. A trust might exist, but some assets may never have been transferred into it. A power of attorney could have been signed years ago and never reviewed. Beneficiary designations may no longer match the rest of the plan. A family might have documents covering what happens after someone passes but less clarity around incapacity.

On a traditional checklist, that person has an estate plan.

Whether the plan is actually ready is a different question.

"We did not want to build another checklist that asks whether you have a will, a trust or a power of attorney," said Erik Halvorson, chief product officer of LegacyGuard Estate Planning. "Those questions matter, but they do not tell you whether the pieces are current, coordinated or working together."

LegacyGuard's answer is to give estate planning something consumers are accustomed to seeing in other parts of their financial lives: a score.

Credit has a score. Retirement planning is filled with projections. Investment accounts show allocations and performance. Insurance policies quantify coverage.

Estate planning has been harder to summarize.

A 2026 national survey of 5,000 U.S. adults commissioned by Trust & Will found that 73% consider estate planning personally important. Yet 56% had none of the five estate planning documents tracked by the survey. Among respondents, 26% had a will, 14% had a trust, 19% had a medical power of attorney or advance directive and 11% had a financial power of attorney. (Trust & Will)

Those numbers show how many Americans have yet to begin estate planning.

They say less about the people who have started.

Someone with a will is counted as having a will whether it was signed last month or decades ago. The same is true of a trust. Document ownership alone does not show whether beneficiary designations have been reviewed, whether assets intended for a trust were properly transferred or whether the plan still reflects a family's current circumstances.

That gap became the starting point for the Legacy Readiness Assessment.

"We kept coming back to the same issue," Halvorson said. "Having documents and being prepared are related, but they are not the same thing. We wanted a way to show people the difference."

The assessment asks consumers a series of questions about the structure and condition of their estate planning.

Responses are evaluated across several areas of readiness rather than producing a simple pass or fail result.

The consumer receives an overall Legacy Readiness Score, along with category level results designed to show where planning appears stronger and where additional attention may be warranted.

LegacyGuard then produces a personalized Legacy Readiness Report that expands on those results.

The report is designed to be more substantial than the typical online quiz result. It includes the overall score, individual category scores and explanations intended to help consumers understand how different parts of their estate plan relate to one another.

That distinction was deliberate, Halvorson said.

"A score without context is not very useful," he said. "If somebody sees a 62, the next question is obvious: Why? The report has to help them understand what contributed to that number and what areas deserve another look."

LegacyGuard developed the assessment around the idea that estate planning functions as a system.

A financial power of attorney deals with one set of circumstances. Healthcare documents address another. A revocable living trust can govern assets that have been properly placed into it. Beneficiary designations may separately control retirement accounts, life insurance and other property. A will can govern assets that become part of a probate estate.

Each piece can serve a different purpose.

The difficulty comes when those pieces were created at different times, through different institutions and for different stages of a person's life.

A couple may create an estate plan before having children. Years later, they may own a different home, have larger retirement accounts, new insurance policies and beneficiaries that were named when the accounts were first opened.

The documents can remain valid while the life around them changes.

That is why plan maintenance became part of the assessment rather than treating estate planning as something completed once.

The American Bar Association has long advised that estate plans should be reviewed as personal and financial circumstances change, including after marriage, divorce, births, deaths and significant changes in assets. Beneficiary designations and ownership arrangements can also determine how certain property transfers, independent of instructions contained elsewhere in an estate plan.

For LegacyGuard, those relationships made a single document checklist increasingly difficult to justify.

"If you only ask whether somebody has a trust, you still do not know whether the assets they intended to put in that trust are actually there," Halvorson said. "If you only ask whether they named beneficiaries, you do not know when those beneficiaries were last reviewed. We wanted the assessment to keep asking the next question."

The launch comes as an enormous amount of American wealth is expected to move between generations.

Cerulli Associates estimates that $124 trillion will transfer through 2048, including approximately $105 trillion expected to pass to heirs and $18 trillion to charities. Nearly $100 trillion of the total is projected to come from Baby Boomers and older generations. (Cerulli Associates)

The size of that transfer has fueled attention around inheritance planning, trusts, beneficiary designations and the financial relationships between parents and their adult children.

Yet preparedness remains uneven.

Trust & Will's 2026 research found that 42% of Americans said they would not know what to do if a family member passed today. Among people with none of the estate planning documents tracked in the survey, that figure rose to 56%. (Trust & Will)

LegacyGuard sees the Legacy Readiness Assessment as a way to make an often abstract subject easier for consumers to examine.

The company is not positioning the score as a legal judgment on whether an estate plan is valid or invalid. The assessment is intended to measure preparedness across the areas it evaluates and identify potential planning gaps that may deserve further review.

That distinction is important.

Estate plans vary by family, assets, state law and individual goals. A score cannot determine what every person should do, and a higher number does not mean every household should have the same documents or planning structure.

Instead, LegacyGuard is trying to give consumers a common framework for asking better questions.

That could include whether a power of attorney is in place, whether beneficiary designations have been reviewed, whether a living trust has been funded, whether important documents reflect major life changes and whether the different pieces of an estate plan point toward the same intended outcome.

The approach also reflects a broader shift in how consumers expect to interact with financial information.

People increasingly encounter dashboards, scores, projections and personalized reports when evaluating their finances. Estate planning has historically offered fewer ways for consumers to see the condition of a plan at a glance.

Halvorson said the product team wanted the Legacy Readiness Score to provide that starting point without reducing estate planning to a number.

"The number gets your attention," he said. "What matters is what is underneath it."

LegacyGuard Estate Planning works with a nationwide network of attorneys and focuses primarily on estate planning for families seeking wills, living trusts and related planning documents.

The company's new assessment moves one step earlier in that process.

Before asking what documents someone should create, it asks what they already have, how those pieces fit together and where the plan may be incomplete.

For an industry built largely around documents, that is a different way of defining the product.

Estate planning readiness is no longer being treated simply as something a person either has or does not have.

LegacyGuard is trying to measure it.

(LegacyGuard Estate Planning operates a nationwide firm connecting families across all 50 states with independent, licensed attorneys who prepare personalized living trusts. The company combines technology, education, and legal expertise to make estate planning accessible and affordable for everyday American families. More information is available at https://LegacyGuardEP.com.)

Press Release. This story was supplied by LegacyGuard Estate Planning and is published as received. Press releases are submitted by third parties and do not reflect the views of Charlotte NC News, which makes no guarantee of their accuracy. How we label stories