# Strategic Wealth Doctrine v0.5 — Real-Participant Validation Protocol (Proposed)

**Status:** Design proposal only; no participant has been recruited, no formal approval has been obtained, and no real-world program effectiveness is established.

## 1. Claim To Evaluate

Does offering a structured Strategic Wealth Doctrine implementation curriculum, compared with an **active, credible financial-education comparator**, improve participants' financial circumstances at 24 months? The curriculum includes inventory, liquidity and debt choices, scenario-based judgment, sustainable income options, and continuity/repair. This is not a test of investment-market outperformance or a guarantee of personal freedom.

## 2. Three-Phase Program

**Phase A — Feasibility (90 days, proposed n≈20–40):** Test readability, accessibility, app and form usability, consent, data quality, retention, participant burden, adverse events, and whether people can carry out the modules. Study may be single arm, but cannot demonstrate causal efficacy. Provisional go/no-go criteria: 80% usable baseline measures; 75% complete day-90 follow-up; no unresolved severe protocol-related harms. Revise these prospectively with stakeholders before enrollment. Do not report changes as proof of benefit.

**Phase B — Comparative Evaluation (24 months, n based on power analysis):** Prefer centrally randomized 1:1 parallel groups, with matched contact frequency and a credible active comparison curriculum (general budgeting, debt, savings and financial consumer rights information, without the doctrine's integrated decision process). No essential financial assistance should be withheld. The choice of primary outcome and its minimally important difference (MID) must be justified before a power calculation. Avoid quoting an unjustified sample size as if it were already powered.

**Phase C — Long-Term Extension (to 10 years):** Optional reconsented extended follow-up. Track persistence, crossovers and attrition. Report the limitations of interpreting long-term differences, including outside opportunities and local economic shocks. Seek independent replication and external review before broad claims.

## 3. Eligibility And Recruitment

Predefine age-of-majority status, region, language/accessibility support, financial situation inclusion, exclusion for immediate crises that need specialized support, and whether household partners may participate together. Recruit through varied channels, disclose any compensation and study sponsorship, screen for coercion, and ensure participants can withdraw without penalty. Offer referral information for emergency assistance. Obtain ethics review and applicable legal analysis before collecting data.

## 4. Primary And Secondary Outcomes

**Candidate primary endpoint:** 24-month change in *liquid net worth* (available cash + financial investments − outstanding consumer debt), assessed using a dated, consistently defined household/accounting boundary, with blinded source-verified adjudication when feasible. This is a candidate, not yet preregistered. Its suitability depends on distribution, meaningful change thresholds, and whether including investment-market variation creates unacceptable noise. A prespecified rank-based or transform-based analysis may be needed for heavy-tailed data. Do not select the endpoint after seeing results.

**Key secondary outcomes:** official 10-item CFPB Financial Well-Being Scale using licensed/publicly allowed instrument instructions and correct scoring; essential-spending cash runway; debt burden; late/unfunded essential payments; annualized savings/investment contributions; wage income; job-change costs; hours/care burden; and participant-defined *feasible options* documented without creating an unvalidated numerical 'agency score'. Include self-reported financial stress and adverse events.

**No composite success index** should be invented without separately testing its reliability and validity.

## 5. Measurement Timetable

| Time | Core measures |
|:--|:--|
| Enrollment | consent; household/accounting boundary; cash/debt/assets; income; costs; employment and care constraints; CFPB scale; site use and demographics where necessary |
| 30 days | usability and burden (pilot); disclosure of harms |
| 90 days | feasibility thresholds; common outcome data quality |
| 6, 12, 18 and 24 months | balance-sheet snapshot; income/expenses; debt terms; cash-flow disruptions; job transitions; CFPB scale; harms; retention |
| Years 3–10 (extension) | annual measures; crossovers; significant outside shocks; documented reasons for missing data |

Use fixed measurement windows, a consistent household boundary, clear valuation dates and participant-controlled document review. Prefer secure attestations over collecting complete bank statements or identifiers not required. Record sources and confidence separately.

## 6. Causal Identification And Analysis

Randomize via a concealed, reproducible sequence; stratify or block for baseline debt-to-income group and broad liquidity category if justified, and avoid post-randomization exclusions. Specify estimand, one primary contrast, baseline adjustment, study-site effects if relevant, and an intention-to-treat analysis. Report treatment uptake and an adherence/completer analysis as secondary, explicitly nonrandomized. Prespecify missingness methods (multiple imputation assumptions, sensitivity for missing not at random), extreme-value handling, contamination, multiple comparisons, subgroup analysis, and a data-lock date. An interim look should not be used to repeatedly hunt for significance.

If randomization is infeasible, use a prospective active matched comparison with careful baseline covariates and sensitivity analyses, and avoid definitive causal language. Clearly distinguish selection bias, regression to the mean, market conditions and pre-existing motivation from program effects.

## 7. Sample Size And Feasibility Budget

No power claim can be made without plausible outcome variability, minimum important difference, attrition, and chosen type-I error and power. An independent statistician should compute scenarios. Example only: for equal-sized two-arm comparisons of means using a standardized effect of 0.30, two-sided α = .05 and 80% power, an approximate normal-theory calculation gives `n per arm ≈ 2 × (1.96 + .84)^2 / (.30)^2 = 175` before attrition. With 25% attrition the recruitment requirement would be about 234 per arm. This is a sensitivity example, **not a final sample size**; distribution and endpoint choice could change it substantially.

Build the budget from staff effort, participant reimbursement, accessibility and language support, secure storage, ethics oversight, data verification, 24-month follow-up, retained analytical support, and publication/replication costs. For example, $100 per participant per year for 200 people across five years already equals $100,000 in reimbursements alone; do not claim a cheaper all-inclusive study budget without calculation.

## 8. Privacy, Safety And Governance

- Obtain informed consent, minimize identifiers, and use encrypted, access-controlled research storage **outside the public educational site**.
- Separate participant identity from measurement data, keep a limited re-identification key under an approved custodian, and document retention/deletion, vendor and incident-response plans.
- Avoid importing bank login credentials or asking users to share account numbers in a website form.
- Use appropriate institutional review, regulatory assessment, professional financial/legal guidance and an independent governance contact before launch.
- Predefine a process for adverse events, acute hardship referral, conflicts of interest, author access boundaries and corrections. Avoid encouraging participants to remain in harmful debt or delay essential care to fit the protocol.

## 9. Preregistration And Public Reporting

Prepare the finalized protocol, statistical analysis plan, codebook and outcome hierarchy before first enrollment. Register in an appropriate public repository such as OSF. Archive protocol amendments with dates and reasons. Release aggregate results and de-identified code/data only after re-identification and consent risks have been evaluated. Report null, adverse and mixed outcomes as faithfully as favorable ones. Provide sampling and limitations prominently.

### Claim Tiers

- **Now:** 'The financial consequences of specified choices can be calculated under disclosed conditions.'
- **After Pilot:** 'We tested feasibility, clarity and data quality in n participants.'
- **After An Adequately Designed Comparison Study:** 'Under these study conditions, estimated measured differences were X, with uncertainty interval Y,' specifying design and limitations.
- **Never Without Evidence:** 'The doctrine guarantees wealth,' 'proves financial freedom,' or 'outperforms markets.'

## 10. Governance Gate Before Recruitment

Do not collect identifiable financial records or accept participants until (a) curriculum and comparator locked, (b) informed consent approved, (c) feasible budget funded, (d) sample-size/statistical plan finalized, (e) security and data steward designated, and (f) external ethics/legal review completed.

References: CFPB Financial Well-Being Scale, FTC truth-in-advertising guidance, SEC adviser-marketing guidance when applicable, and the CONSORT randomized trial reporting checklist. These references inform method and reporting; they do not endorse or validate this doctrine.