Research | Five Original Datasets, CC BY 4.0

Updated July 31, 2026. Quick answer: Clear Money Guide publishes five original datasets. Each one was built by reading primary sources — SEC Form ADV filings, state statutes, court fee schedules — rather than by aggregating other people’s summaries, and each is released under CC BY 4.0, so anyone may reuse it with attribution. This page is the index: what each dataset measures, where the methodology is written down, and how to cite it.

The five datasets

Advisor fee benchmark. What registered investment advisers actually charge, taken from their own published Form ADV fee schedules rather than from a survey: weighted medians by portfolio size, and a measure of how many firms publish a fee you can price at all. The benchmark, with its methodology and citation block.

Advisor statistics by state. Counts and concentration of advisers across the United States, state by state. Advisor statistics.

Transfer-on-death deed statutes. Which states authorise a TOD deed for real property, under what statute, and with what limits — verified against each state’s own code. TOD deed states.

Medicaid estate recovery. What each state may recover from an estate after Medicaid has paid for care, and the exemptions that apply. Medicaid estate recovery.

Probate costs by state. What probate actually costs, built from published fee schedules and statutory formulas rather than national averages. Probate cost by state and the underlying statistics. Related: retirement tax statistics.

Methodology, corrections and machine-readable copies

Every dataset page carries its own methodology section and cite-as string; those are the authoritative versions and this page does not restate them. Machine-readable copies live at the data directory. How the work is done and how errors are handled: methodology, editorial policy, and corrections — corrections are logged publicly, including which figures changed.

For journalists and researchers

All five datasets are reusable under CC BY 4.0: reproduce the figures, charts and tables in your own work, including commercially, with attribution to Clear Money Guide and a link to the source page. Each page’s cite-as string is the preferred form. If you need a cut we have not published — a different balance point, a state breakdown, an earlier vintage — ask, and if the underlying data supports it we will publish it rather than send a private extract, so everyone can check it. Contact.

Two honest limits. These are datasets built by a small independent publisher, not peer-reviewed research, and they are described that way deliberately. And each has a vintage — the date it was collected is on its page, and figures drawn from filings and statutes go stale as those change.

Research: Five Original Datasets, Free to Reuse Under CC BY 4.0

The five datasets

Methodology, corrections and machine-readable copies

For journalists and researchers

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