Editorial Policy

This page identifies who is responsible for The Penny Plan and the standards used to assess and correct its content. A stated standard is not a certification that every sentence has passed an independent review. Readers should be able to inspect the sources, assumptions, and limitations on the page they are using.

Who is responsible

Every page on this site is published under the editorial responsibility of Eli Wright, the site’s owner and editor. There is no anonymous byline: if something is wrong, there is a named person accountable for it and a contact address to reach.

Eli Wright is not a financial adviser, accountant, attorney, or tax professional. Nothing on this site is personalized financial advice, and no article knows anything about your situation. The purpose here is narrower and, we think, more honest: explain how a rule or a product actually works so you can reason about your own circumstances and know what to ask a qualified professional.

What we publish, and what we refuse to publish

We publish general educational explanations of money topics: how a mechanism works, what the terms mean, what the trade-offs are, and where the official rules live.

We do not publish, ever:

Standards for research and writing

  1. Answer a useful question. A guide should help the reader understand a mechanism or complete a task. A keyword or a different title alone does not justify another page.
  2. Match the source to the claim. Factual statements about taxes, credit, banking, insurance, benefits, and investing need relevant primary references. A general agency homepage or an unrelated tax rule does not support a provider-practice claim. Sources should let a reader locate the rule, check its scope, and identify its effective date.
  3. Date figures that change. Contribution limits, premiums, thresholds, and rates need the applicable year or observation date. If a current figure is not verified, explain the mechanism and link to the responsible authority instead.
  4. Identify the original work accurately. Calculated examples need stated inputs and reproducible arithmetic. Illustrative inputs are not observed outcomes. A checklist or qualitative comparison should explain its choices and limitations without claiming a calculation, a survey, or verification that was not performed.
  5. Show limits in plain language. Define necessary jargon, distinguish general rules from exceptions, and make clear when a contract, jurisdiction, tax year, or individual circumstance can change the answer.

How AI is used, and where the line is

We are direct about this because readers deserve to know. Modern writing and research tools, including large language models, are used in drafting and editing work on this site. That does not change who is accountable: every page is published under human editorial responsibility, and the standards on this page apply regardless of how a draft was produced. A tool does not get to publish here. A person does, and that person’s name is on it.

Publishing is manual and limited to small, reviewed changes. The automated trend-to-draft workflow was removed on September 2, 2026; its archived tooling does not run on a schedule or publish pages. Research and editing tools may assist with a draft, but each proposed change requires human review and approval before publication.

Review and updating

Guides display “Published” and, when recorded, “Updated” dates. Published is the original publication date; Updated records a content change, which may be as small as a corrected link. Updated does not certify a full source review or review by a financial professional. Any specific verification statement must identify what was checked and the date of that check.

Guides covering rules that shift (tax thresholds, benefit premiums, contribution limits) are prioritized for re-review, since those are the pages where being out of date does the most damage.

Corrections

If something here is wrong, out of date, or misleading, we want to fix it, and we would rather hear it from you than leave it up.

Report it through the Contact page. The process is:

  1. We check the claim against the primary source.
  2. If it is wrong, we correct the page itself rather than quietly deleting it.
  3. Substantive corrections update the page’s content date and explain the affected assumption or rule. They do not imply that unrelated parts of the page were reverified.

Advertising and independence

This site may display third-party advertising. Advertisers have no input into what we write, which topics we cover, or what any article concludes. Ad content is served by the ad network and is not an endorsement by us. Our Privacy Policy explains what advertising means for your data and how to opt out.

Where this policy sits

This policy sits alongside our Methodology page, which names the specific data sources behind the figures on this site, the Sources reference list, and the Disclaimer, which is the controlling statement of what this site is and is not.