Your LQ Score is a credit score for your family, not for a lender
A credit score tells a bank how you look on paper. This one tells you how your household would cope without you, which is the question nobody scores.
The short answer
The LQ Score is a 0 to 100 measure of how ready a household is across four pillars: financial health, estate readiness, protection and generational impact. It works like a credit score in that a single number makes a vague obligation measurable and movable. It differs in that it is never reported to a bureau, never affects your borrowing, and is shared with nobody unless you choose to share it.
Almost everybody knows their credit score. Almost nobody can tell you how their family would manage the month after they died, even though the second question matters more to the people they love than the first ever will.
That asymmetry is not because people care less. It is because one of those things has a number and the other does not.
What a credit score actually did
Before credit scoring, lending decisions were made on relationships and impressions. Scoring did not make anybody more creditworthy. It made creditworthiness visible, comparable and, crucially, improvable: once you can see 620, you can see what moves it to 680.
The number changed behavior far more than any advice did. People pay down a card before applying for a mortgage not because a leaflet persuaded them, but because they can watch the figure respond.
What the LQ Score measures instead
Your LQ Score reads four pillars together: financial health, estate readiness, protection and generational impact. Not one of them is a question a lender cares about. All four are questions your family would face in a week they were not expecting.
Reading them together is the part that is hard to do by yourself. A household can be excellent on money and poor on readiness, and it usually is. Savings, a pension and a rising net worth mean very little on the day nobody can find a will, nobody has authority to pay the mortgage, and the house is titled in one name.
Why a number works when a checklist does not
Estate planning has always come as a list, and a list has a flat structure: every item looks equally urgent, so the whole thing looks like a weekend you do not have. That is why lists get postponed rather than started.
A score has a shape. It says the guardian paragraph is worth more to you right now than the trust you were told to want, and it says so in points rather than in opinion. The task stops being "sort out my estate" and becomes "do this one thing this evening", which is the only size of task anybody actually completes.
This is also why the score is free and needs no card. A measurement that costs money to see is a measurement most people never take.
Three ways it is the opposite of a credit score
It is not reported to anybody. There is no bureau, no file, and no version of your score sitting with a third party. It is not sold, not brokered, and never shown to a lender or an insurer.
It cannot be used against you. A credit score is a judgment made about you for somebody else’s decision. This one exists for your decision, and a low score is not a verdict. It is a starting position, and the platform’s job is to tell you what moves it.
You decide who sees it. It is shared inside the platform with a Legacy Professional only when you choose to connect with one, and that is the point of sharing it: somebody qualified can see the same gaps you can, without you having to explain your whole life first.
What moves it
Signing something you have been meaning to sign, usually. Naming a backup guardian. Funding a trust you already paid to create. Correcting a beneficiary designation that still lists an ex spouse, which is the single most common thing we find and the cheapest to fix.
The score recalculates as you act and as your life changes, so it goes stale on purpose when something moves: a new state, a new child, a new account. A number that never changed would be a certificate rather than a measurement.
Questions people also ask
Does my LQ Score affect my credit or my ability to borrow?
No. It is not reported to any credit bureau and no lender or insurer ever sees it. It exists for your own decisions and nobody else’s.
What is a good LQ Score?
The bands run Needs work, Fair, Good and Excellent, and most households start lower than they expect. The useful figure is not the score itself but the movement: what a specific action is worth is shown in points next to it.
How are the four pillars weighted?
They are not weighted evenly, and how they combine is proprietary. What the platform does show you is the direction each pillar contributed and which single action would move your score most.
Legacy Buddy provides document creation tools, not legal advice.
What to take from this
- A single number makes a vague obligation measurable, which is why scoring changed borrowing behavior and why it changes this.
- The four pillars are read together, because money and paperwork fail as a pair rather than separately.
- It is never reported, never sold, and shared only with a professional you choose.
- It is free and takes about five minutes, because a measurement that costs money is one most people never take.
Knowing what to do is the hard part. This is the easy part.
Joining is free and stays free: your LQ™ Score, your recommendations and your vault, with no card. A plan is for when you want the documents themselves.
Free forever. No card. You pay only when you want documents.