How we source these guides.

Our guides describe legal, probate, benefits and financial processes to people who are usually reading them in the worst week of their lives. Getting a detail wrong is not a typo; it can cost somebody a deadline or a house. This page sets out the rules we hold ourselves to, so you can judge how much weight to put on what you read here.

Where the facts come from

Anything on a guide that states a rule, a limit, a deadline or an official process is traced to a primary source: the statute itself, a state court’s own self-help page, or the federal agency that administers the program. We do not use another company’s article as the source for a legal, tax, benefits, probate or financial claim. If the only thing we can find is somebody else’s blog post, we treat the question as unanswered.

Each source we cite is stored with the page it came from and the date somebody opened that page and read it. That date is printed next to the citation, so you can see how fresh the check actually was rather than trusting a “last updated” stamp that moved when a designer changed a margin.

What we do when we are not sure

We say so, and we leave the number out. State rules in particular change on their own schedules, and some states publish them in places that are genuinely hard to confirm. Where we could not verify a state’s current figure on an official page, the guide says that plainly and points you to the probate clerk in the right county instead of showing a number we are not certain about. A guide whose sources have not been verified is not published at all — it stays a draft, out of search results, until someone does the reading.

How automation is allowed to help

We use software, including AI, to find questions worth answering, to assemble research briefs, to draft, and to run checks. It is not allowed to decide that something is true. Every draft passes automated gates before anyone can publish it: claims must carry a citation, state-specific statements must name their state, a national page may not present one state’s rule as the national rule, sources must resolve, and pages that touch legal, tax, probate, benefits or financial questions stay in human review regardless of how clean the automated checks come back.

What we will not claim

• That a lawyer reviewed this. Go Forward is not a law firm and does not employ one to review these pages. Where a question genuinely needs a lawyer, we say so.
• Credentials or reviewers we do not have. No “expert reviewed” badges, no invented author biographies, no professional bodies we are not part of.
• Ratings, testimonials or usage numbers we cannot evidence. We keep a written register of every claim of that kind and what supports it, and anything unsupported comes off the site.
• A review date we did not earn. The review date moves when somebody re-reads the sources and confirms the page still matches them. It does not move for a formatting change or a rewritten sentence.

Deadlines and urgency

We only describe something as urgent when an official deadline genuinely makes it urgent, and when we can cite the rule that sets it. We do not use countdowns, scarcity or fear to move people toward the paid product. Most of what follows a death can wait a few days, and saying so honestly is more useful than manufacturing pressure.

Your information stays out of this

Nothing you enter into a plan appears on a public page, ever. The guides are written from public sources only. We also keep the details of your situation out of our analytics: what we measure about a guide is the page, not the reader — the slug, the topic, whether the page is national or state-specific, and how you arrived. Never a name, a date of death, or anything you typed.

Telling us we got something wrong

If you find a mistake, or a rule that has changed, email hello@goforward.life with the page address and what you believe is wrong. Corrections to a factual claim take priority over everything else we are working on. If you can point us at the official page that shows the current rule, that is the fastest possible route.

You can also read who we are and how we handle your information, or browse all the guides.