Editorial Guidelines

What we are trying to do

The Wallet Wisdom publishes practical financial guidance for people dealing with real expenses — an emergency repair, a medical bill, a wedding budget, a benefits application. The test every article has to pass is whether it would actually help someone facing that exact problem today.

This is YMYL content: people make money decisions based on what we publish. That raises the standard for sourcing and it raises the cost of being wrong, so the rules below are written to be checkable rather than flattering.

How an article gets made

1. Research. We start from primary sources: government and regulator publications and program pages (CFPB, IRS, FTC, HUD, DOL, CMS, SSA, BLS, Census, NHTSA), the state or county agency that actually administers a program, and companies' own published policies and price lists. If a claim only exists on blogs, it does not go in.
2. Writing. Drafted by a member of the editorial team, with the specifics readers need — real form numbers, real program names, a script or checklist, and at least one worked example with the arithmetic shown.
3. Fact-check and edit. A person other than the drafter reads it against the sources, opens every link, and cuts anything that cannot be verified. Numbers get checked at the source, not at the source's summary of itself.
4. Maintenance. Articles are revisited when rules, prices, or programs change, and when readers flag something. Pages tied to a specific year go back on the list before that year's figures matter.

How we cite sources

Where an article turns on rules, eligibility, or legal rights, the primary sources are listed at the bottom of the page under "Sources and further reading", each linking straight to the official document rather than to a homepage. Those are usually federal agencies and regulators, or the state agency that runs the program.

Every page now carries a source list and a "Last reviewed" date next to the publish date. Getting there meant opening each cited page rather than trusting that a URL still pointed where it once did — a check that turned up sources which returned a perfectly healthy status code while serving an entirely different article, and one government page that answered with a valid page titled "Invalid URL". Those were replaced. A link that resolves but no longer supports the claim is worse than a dead one, because nothing flags it.

We do not cite competitor blogs, content farms, or aggregators, and we do not cite a page we have not opened. Where a figure comes from an industry survey rather than a government dataset, the article says which survey and from what year.

How we handle money claims

Most of what people come here for is a number, and numbers are where financial publishing goes wrong. Our rules:

• Cost figures are ranges assembled from public data, not quotes. When we write that a repair runs $400 to $900, that is what published data and price lists show as typical — not an estimate for your job, and not a promise about what any provider will charge you.
• Anything year-specific is labelled with its year. Contribution limits, tax brackets, benefit amounts, and premium figures move. An unlabelled number is a bug; tell us and we will fix it.
• Rules that vary by state are described as varying by state, with a pointer to the agency that decides, rather than flattened into a single national answer that is wrong in forty places.
• If we cannot source a figure, we cut it or restate the point qualitatively. "Ambulance bills are frequently in the hundreds to low thousands" is an acceptable sentence. An invented average is not.
• No guaranteed outcomes. No guaranteed approval, no "you will qualify", no promised savings totals, no free-money framing. Our negotiation guides say plainly how often the tactic fails.

How AI is used here

Straight answer, because readers deserve one and because a vague answer would be worse than useless: our team may use AI writing tools while producing an article — for a first outline, for tightening a clumsy paragraph, for drafting. What that never replaces is the human part.

• Every article is researched, edited, and fact-checked by a person before it is published. A person opens the sources and confirms each figure.
• No text is published straight from a model without that review. Machine-drafted prose that cannot be verified gets cut, not softened.
• Sources are never generated. Every link in a source list has been opened by a person; a plausible-looking citation that does not resolve is treated as a fabrication and removed.
• We do not invent authors, credentials, testimonials, or reader stories, with or without a model's help.
• We take full responsibility for everything published here regardless of what tools touched the draft. "The tool got it wrong" is not a defence, and it will never appear in a correction notice.

Corrections

Errors get fixed in public. When a factual error is corrected, a dated correction note goes at the top of the article, in this form:

Three rules govern that note:

• It is dated, it says what was wrong and what it says now, and it stays on the page. We do not quietly edit a number and move on.
• It credits the reader who flagged it, unless they would rather we did not. Say so in your email if you would prefer no mention.
• Corrections notes are never deleted to tidy up a page. A page with a correction on it is more trustworthy than one without, not less.

Routine updates — a program's new annual figures, a refreshed price range, a replaced dead link — are not corrections. Those are reflected in the "Last reviewed" date rather than in a note, because a note on every routine refresh would make real corrections invisible.

To report an error, email editorial@thewalletwisdom.com with the article link and the specific problem. We acknowledge within two business days and resolve or explain within five. If we check and conclude the original was right, we write back and say so, with the source.

Independence and money

The site is free and is paid for by display advertising served through Google AdSense. We do not sell ad placements ourselves, so there is no advertiser to have a relationship with: the slots are filled by an automated auction, and we do not know who will appear next to an article.

We take no referral fees from lenders, insurers, or financial-service providers. We run no affiliate links and no sponsored posts, and we do not accept payment for editorial coverage or for a mention in a list. Nobody outside the editorial team sees an article before publication or can ask for a change after it. If any of this ever changes, the disclosure will be on the page where the money is, before the money arrives. Full detail is in our advertising disclosure.

Keeping pages current

Program rules, prices, and thresholds move constantly, and a stale page in this subject area is a harmful page. We work through the library in rolling passes, prioritising articles whose figures are tied to a specific year and those that get the most traffic. A page that has been re-checked shows a "Last reviewed" date; a page without one is waiting its turn. Seasonal and annual guides are updated before the season they cover.

What we do not do

• We do not give personalized financial, tax, or legal advice, and reading us creates no advisory relationship. See the disclaimer.
• We do not guarantee outcomes, savings, approvals, or eligibility.
• We do not publish guest posts, paid links, or sponsored articles.
• We do not copy text from other publishers. Facts come from primary sources and get restated in our own words.
• We do not use shame or fear as a device. Needing help with an unexpected expense is ordinary.
• We do not collect reader data to sell. The site has no signup, no forms, and no accounts.

How to challenge us

If you think a claim on this site is wrong, you do not need to be polite about it — send the article link, the sentence, and ideally the source that contradicts us, to editorial@thewalletwisdom.com. Readers who work in the industries we write about catch things we miss, and those emails are the most useful mail we get.

More about who does this work is on the editorial team page.