Editorial Standards

How we write

Every fact on this site traces back to a primary source — the CFPB, the FTC, the Federal Reserve, the Federal Register, or the actual text of a state statute. Not a blog, not another "debt help" site repeating what it read somewhere else. If we can't point to where a claim comes from, we don't publish it.

Who actually checks this before it goes live

We run a two-tier review process. Plain restatements of something a primary source already says clearly — what an IRS notice itself says its purpose is, what a statute's text actually reads — get checked directly against that source by our editorial team. Anything with real dollar math (our calculators), a court deadline, a tax consequence, or an outright recommendation has to be signed off by a retained, credentialed reviewer before we publish it.

We're not lawyers, CPAs, or financial counselors, and nothing here is advice tailored to your specific situation. When we do cite a credentialed reviewer, you can independently verify their license or accreditation yourself — we link straight to their state bar or accreditation registry from their author page.

How we make money, and what that doesn't touch

Some pages here — the ones with a visible advertiser disclosure banner — link to debt-relief companies that pay us if you enroll with them. That relationship never touches the facts we report or how we build a comparison or ranking. The glossary, debt-type explainers, state pages, crisis-stage guides, and our CFPB data tools carry no advertiser relationship at all — nobody's paying for anything on those pages, which is why you won't see a disclosure banner on them.

If we got something wrong

Tell us, and we'll check it against the primary source ourselves. When we confirm something needs fixing, we log it below with the date and a plain description of what changed — no quietly editing the page and hoping nobody noticed.