Updated August 7, 2026. Quick answer: some money numbers get repeated so often that they stop being checkable. The source drops away, the year drops away, and what survives is a sentence everyone quotes and nobody can trace back to anything. This page is where we trace them.
Each audit takes one circulating claim, finds the earliest version we can locate, tests what that source actually measured, and states the honest current figure from primary sources. Then it gives a verdict from a fixed list of six, chosen before the evidence was assembled — the method is published in full at how we check money claims.
The audits
| The claim | Verdict | The honest number |
|---|---|---|
| Florida allows a transfer-on-death deed | FALSE | It does not. The statute cited as authority governs homestead devise restrictions. Florida uses the Lady Bird deed. |
| Delaware does not allow a TOD deed | OUTDATED | It has since December 2025 (HB 147, signed 5 September 2025). |
| Connecticut allows a TOD deed | FALSE | Its 2026 bill died in committee on 6 May 2026. The current count is 35 jurisdictions yes, 16 no. |
| The median age of widowhood is 59 | UNSUPPORTED | No federal statistic gives one. Among people widowed in the past year, 69% of women were 65 or older. |
| Half of Americans have no will | INCOMPLETE | About 46% have one — but 76% of those 65+ do, against 20% of under-30s. |
| 70% of families lose their wealth by the second generation | MUTATED | The source says 70% of estate transfers see families lose control and become divided. The 90% figure appears nowhere in it. |
| 10,000 boomers turn 65 every day | CONFIRMED | True, and it expires. Pew said “for the next 19 years” from 2011; Census data implies ~11,400/day today. |
| The average inheritance is $46,200 | UNSUPPORTED | The Fed publishes no average. Half of inheritances are under $50,000; transfers over $1m are 2% of the count and 40% of the money. |
| Medicare covers long-term care | FALSE | Medicare covers up to 100 days of skilled nursing per benefit period, not long-term care. |
| You need 80% of your pre-retirement income to retire | MUTATED | 76.9% of pre-retirement spending, but only 53.8% of pre-retirement income (BLS CES 2024). |
| Women outlive men by 5 to 7 years | MUTATED | 5.3 years at birth, but 2.5 among those who reach 65 and 0.9 by 85 (NCHS, 2023). |
| Half of all marriages end in divorce | MUTATED | CDC’s marriage and divorce rates use different denominators; Census puts ever-divorced at 34% of women, 33% of men. |
| Only farms and small businesses pay the estate tax | FALSE | Farm assets were 2.26% of taxable estate value in 2024; publicly traded stock was 33.27% (IRS SOI). |
| The average 401(k) balance is about $167,970 | MUTATED | Real, but the same report’s median is $44,115, and it covers one recordkeeper’s book, not the country. |
What publishers currently say, checked on 7 August 2026
Every page below was fetched on 7 August 2026 and the wording quoted is what it contained on that date. We are recording what was published, not why, and a page can be corrected at any time — check it yourself before relying on this.
| Page | Its own date | What it says about the three |
|---|---|---|
| deeds.com | “Last reviewed: January 2026” | Matches the statutes. States 35 authorising and 16 not; lists Florida and Connecticut among those without, and Delaware among those with. The same count we reach independently. |
| smartasset.com | “Updated on June 12, 2026” | Lists Florida in its “States Where TOD Deeds Are Legal” list, between Colorado and Hawaii. It gives a total of 28 states plus DC. Delaware and Connecticut do not appear. |
| policygenius.com | “Updated January 13, 2023” | Lists 31 states, none of the three among them. Correct for its stated date — it predates Delaware’s adoption and says so on its face. |
| trustandwill.com | “Last updated: April 3, 2026” | Lists 29 jurisdictions. None of the three appears, so it makes no claim about any of them. |
Three things are worth saying about that table, and none of them is a complaint.
- A publisher gets it exactly right. deeds.com reaches 35 and 16 independently of us, from its own reading. That is the single most useful row here, because it shows the correct answer was available to anyone who went and looked.
- The dated older page is not the problem. policygenius states January 2023 plainly, and a 2023 list that says 31 was right in 2023. The risk is in citing it as current, which is the reader’s job to check and ours to make easy.
- Florida is the outlier that a date cannot explain. Delaware moving is a timing problem that fixes itself on the next update. Florida has never authorised a TOD deed, so its appearance on a current list is not staleness — and that is exactly the difference between our OUTDATED and FALSE classes.
We fetched each page ourselves and quote its own words and its own date. No motive is attributed to anyone; wrong entries in this category are overwhelmingly inherited rather than invented, which is the whole reason this desk exists. If any of these pages is corrected, tell us and we will update this table.
Three audits, all in the transfer-on-death family, all resting on our own 51-jurisdiction statute-cited roster. They ship together because they are one phenomenon: a list of states that ages in one direction while two states sit in it for reasons that were never right. More audits follow in this batch.
What gets audited, and what does not
A claim qualifies if it asserts a checkable fact and it circulates widely enough that getting it wrong changes decisions. Statistics about how many people do something, dollar figures presented as typical, and legal claims about what a state allows are the three families that keep coming up.
Opinions, forecasts and advice do not qualify, however wrong they look. Neither does anything that reduces to a definition dispute with no factual core.
We audit claims, not the people repeating them. Where a publisher is named it is as a matter of record — what was published, when, with a link and the date we read it — and never with a motive attached. Most wrong numbers in circulation are being repeated in good faith by people who inherited them, which is the mechanism worth understanding and not a thing to be rude about.
The pattern we expect to find, stated in advance
Building our own state-law tables, we kept meeting the same failure, and it was never invention. It was a number that is perfectly correct somewhere else in the law, attached to the wrong question. Three we have already published:
- Tennessee’s “30 days” for a security deposit is real — it is the window in which a landlord must discover damage, running against the landlord. It is not a deadline to return your money.
- Washington’s “25% of the first month’s rent” is real — it caps a holding fee, not a deposit.
- Washington’s remote-notarization “2027” is real — it is the date an expansion takes effect. Remote notarization has been legal there since 2020. We got that one wrong ourselves and corrected it on the page.
We are stating this before the audits run so it can be held against us. If the pattern is real, the useful question about a suspect number is not “is it false?” but “where is it true?” If the audits do not bear that out, this section will say so. It is a hypothesis, and it is here to be falsified.
When we are wrong
A desk that audits other people’s errors will make some. Ours get a dated correction on the page itself, not a silent edit, and a line in the correction log. The Washington example above is one, published here on the day the desk opened, because a standard that has never cost us anything is not evidence of much.
If you think an audit is wrong, tell us — with a source, which is the only thing that will change our minds.
Free to reuse with attribution under CC BY 4.0. See also how we build our own numbers and the datasets behind them. No advertising appears on this page and we earn nothing from it.
Cite the Provenance File
Suggested citation: “The Provenance File,” Clear Money Guide, 2026, clearmoneyguide.com/provenance-file/.
Each audit carries its own sources and its own “what to cite instead” sentence; cite the individual audit where you are using its finding, and this index where you are describing the desk. Free to reuse with attribution under CC BY 4.0. No advertising appears on any audit page and we earn nothing from them.