Editorial Policy

This page describes how content on The Penny Plan is produced: who is responsible for it, what standards it has to meet, how it is reviewed, and how mistakes get fixed. It is written so you can judge for yourself how much weight to give what you read here.

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We do not publish, ever:

How an article is researched and written

  1. It starts from a real question. Topics come from questions people actually ask, phrased the way people actually ask them, not from keyword lists.
  2. The rules are checked at the source first. Claims about taxes, credit, banking, insurance, benefits, and investing are checked against the published guidance of the body that sets or enforces the rule: the IRS, CFPB, SEC, FINRA, FDIC, Federal Reserve, Social Security Administration, Department of Labor, Medicare, and comparable authorities. Where a page relies on a specific rule or figure, the primary source is listed at the bottom of that page.
  3. Figures are dated or deferred. Numbers that change (contribution limits, premiums, thresholds, rates) are either labelled with the year they apply to, or deliberately left out in favour of explaining the mechanism and linking the official page that carries the current figure. A confidently stated wrong number is worse than no number.
  4. Worked examples show the arithmetic. Where a calculation is involved, we show it step by step with real numbers so you can follow the logic and redo it with your own figures rather than taking a result on trust.
  5. Plain language is a requirement, not a style preference. Jargon gets defined the first time it appears, or it gets cut.

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.

Automated tooling is also used to surface which questions are trending and to pull current figures from official data feeds. What that tooling produces is a draft and a set of candidate topics, never a live page. Nothing reaches the site without a human reading it, checking it, and approving it.

Review and updating

Pages that carry a “Reviewed” date have been through an editorial review pass on that date. Where a page has only a published date, that is the date it first went up. We do not refresh dates cosmetically: a review date changes only when the content actually changed.

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 reviewed date.

Advertising and independence

This site carries third-party advertising, which is how it is funded. 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.