§ 6.3 Reference
About This Publication
The Texas Legacy Ledger is an independent reference on estate planning, probate, long-term care and special needs planning under Texas law. It is not a law firm, not a directory, and not a lead generator.
What it is
A single-purpose reference site. Each page explains how one part of a difficult body of law is structured, in ordinary English, and points to the primary source so the reader can verify it independently. The subjects are chosen because they recur, because the rules are counterintuitive, and because the cost of a misunderstanding is unusually high.
The audience is the person who has to decide something: the adult child of a parent who has just been hospitalised, the newly appointed executor, the parent of a child with a disability trying to work out how to leave them anything at all. The writing is aimed at that reader rather than at a professional one.
What it is not
It is not a law practice and provides no legal services. Nothing here is legal advice, and reading it creates no professional relationship of any kind.
It does not take enquiries, and there is no contact form, no intake, no case evaluation and no consultation to schedule. It does not refer readers to any firm and receives nothing from anyone for anything published here.
It does not sell anything, carries no advertising, accepts no sponsorship, and uses no affiliate arrangements. Where organisations are named on the resources page, they appear because they are useful — several of them provide help at no cost — and not because of any relationship with this publication.
Editorial rules
Four rules govern what appears here.
Cite the primary source. Where a page describes a rule, it names the statute, regulation or agency publication behind it and links to it. A reader should never have to take this site's word for anything material.
Do not print figures that expire. Nearly every dollar amount in benefits law is adjusted annually, and some change twice a year. Rather than publish numbers that quietly go stale, the pages explain how each figure is set and where the current value is published. The key figures page is built entirely on this principle.
Say when something is uncertain or has changed. Several of the areas covered here moved recently and substantially: retirement account inheritance in 2019, veterans' pension eligibility in 2018, the Texas perpetuities period in 2021. Where older advice is now wrong, the pages say so rather than quietly presenting the new position as though it were always the case.
Recommend against complexity that is not needed. A good deal of published material in this field exists to justify a product. Where the honest answer is that a straightforward will, a durable power of attorney and the two medical documents will do the whole job, the pages say that — as the living trusts page does at some length.
Jurisdiction and scope
The scope is Texas. That is a deliberate constraint rather than a limitation of ambition: estate and benefits law varies enough between states that a national treatment is either superficial or misleading. Texas is a community property state with an unusually strong homestead exemption, an income-cap Medicaid system and an independent administration regime that makes its probate unlike most of the country's. Advice imported from elsewhere is frequently wrong here.
Federal programmes — Social Security, SSI, Medicare and the federal Medicaid framework — are described as they apply in Texas.
Limitations, stated plainly
A reference cannot see your facts. Outcomes in this field turn on the exact wording of a deed, the date on a transfer, the terms of a policy, a marital history, the content of a physician's note. A page that reads as though it settles a question may be answering a slightly different one than yours.
Before acting on anything here, consult a lawyer licensed in your jurisdiction. If cost is the obstacle, the resources page lists the free and low-cost options, several of which serve Texans aged sixty and over with no income test at all.