Eli Wright

Owner and editor, The Penny Plan. Engineering manager by profession. Every guide on this site is published under his editorial responsibility, and his name is the byline on all of them. Contact: info@thepennyplan.com · LinkedIn

Eli is not a financial adviser, accountant, or attorney, and nothing on this site is personalized financial advice. That limit is deliberate and it shapes everything here. The Penny Plan exists to do one thing: explain how everyday money topics work, in plain English, from primary sources, so readers can reason about their own situations and know what questions to bring to a qualified professional.

Why this site exists

Most personal finance writing fails in one of two directions. It is either written for people who already speak the language, or it is written to sell something. The gap in between is enormous: someone with a normal question, like whether a 401(k) loan gets taxed twice or what actually happens to a credit score when a card is closed, and no easy way to get a straight answer.

The Penny Plan is an attempt at that middle ground. Explain the mechanism. Show the arithmetic. Name the official source. Stop before the sales pitch.

The background behind the tools

Eli’s professional background is engineering, not financial advising. He manages engineering work and has more than a decade of experience checking calculations, documenting assumptions, and reviewing technical work before it is released. That quantitative background is most relevant to The Penny Plan’s calculators and decision tools: formulas should be visible, inputs should be defined, edge cases should be tested, and an estimate should never be presented as a guarantee.

It does not make Eli a financial professional, and the site does not claim otherwise. It does mean the tools are approached as models that readers should be able to inspect, reproduce, and challenge. The Methodology page documents the formulas, limitations, source authorities, and privacy model.

How articles are researched

• Guides start from real questions people ask, phrased the way they ask them.
• Claims about taxes, credit, banking, insurance, and benefits are checked against the published guidance of the agencies that set the rules: the CFPB, IRS, SEC, FINRA, FDIC, Federal Reserve, Social Security Administration, and Department of Labor, among others. The reference list lives on the Sources page, and individual guides cite their primary sources in a “Sources and further reading” section.
• Where a calculation is involved, guides show the arithmetic step by step, so a reader can follow it and redo it with their own numbers instead of trusting a result.
• Articles avoid quoting rates, limits, and thresholds that go stale. Where a figure genuinely helps it is labelled with the year it applies to; otherwise the guide explains the mechanism and points to the official source for today’s number.
• Drafting and editing make use of modern writing tools, including AI. Every page is published under human editorial responsibility, and the standards above apply regardless of how a draft was produced. The Editorial Policy sets out exactly where that line sits.

Independence

This site carries advertising, which is how it is funded. No advertiser has any say in what gets written or what an article concludes, and nothing here is a paid placement or a sponsored recommendation. The Penny Plan does not sell financial products and has no relationship with any bank, lender, insurer, or broker.

Corrections and updates

If something on this site is wrong or out of date, that is a bug worth fixing. Report it through the Contact page or by email, and corrections are verified against primary sources and fixed on the page itself rather than quietly removed. Guides display a “Reviewed” date when they have been through an editorial review pass, and that date changes only when the content actually changed.

What this site will never do

No stock picks. No “guaranteed” returns. No get-rich-quick framing. No pretending general information is personal advice. For decisions that carry real weight, a qualified professional who knows your full picture beats any article, including ours. See the full Disclaimer.