Editorial standards

Source hierarchy

Claims must trace to the strongest available source, in this order:

1. Primary law — statutes (e.g., FCRA, FDCPA, Bankruptcy Code), regulations (e.g., Regulation F, Regulation V), and official forms.
2. Official government guidance — CFPB, FTC, U.S. Courts, U.S. Trustee Program, state courts, and state attorneys general.
3. Established nonprofit and academic sources — legal aid organizations, the National Consumer Law Center, court self-help centers.
4. Reputable industry sources — used sparingly, for factual mechanics only (e.g., how a bureau’s portal works), never as legal authority.

Legal, credit-reporting, debt-collection, and bankruptcy pages must display a visible Sources section. If a legal claim cannot be sourced, it is removed or rewritten as an explicitly general statement.

Fact-checking and legal-risk review

Every page carries an internal legal-risk level: low (general credit education), medium (dispute and collection rights), high (lawsuits, garnishment, bankruptcy), or critical (anything touching deadlines, court responses, or filing decisions). High and critical pages carry stronger disclaimers and prominent professional-help prompts, and are queued for review by a qualified professional. Reviewer names appear only when a real, named person has actually reviewed the page — we never fabricate reviewers or credentials.

Named authorship and reviewer status, as of today

This site is founded and edited by one named, accountable person — see Ryan Bonelli’s author profile. That profile deliberately does not claim consumer-credit, lending, or legal credentials, because none were asserted to us. Standing behind editorial standards and having subject-matter expertise in consumer credit law are two different claims, and we only make the one we can back up.

As of today, the authors and reviewers page credits 1 named person, of whom 0 hold a subject-matter or consumer-law reviewer role. That count is generated from the same data the authors page reads, not typed in by hand here, so it changes the moment it becomes true and not a moment before.

Today that number is zero. That is why no guide on this site is marked “expert-reviewed” and no page names a subject-matter reviewer: none has been retained yet. Rather than guess, article bylines show a “Pending professional review” marker instead — never a blank, and never a fabricated name. We run no reviews we have not actually performed, and we credit no reviewer who has not actually reviewed the specific page carrying their name.

The moment a qualified, credentialed reviewer is retained and consents to be credited, we add them to this registry with their real name, credentials, disclosures, and the specific guides they review — and only then do those guides carry their name. Nothing is renamed or re-badged in advance of that.

Update cadence

Laws in this area change: 2025 alone saw federal medical-debt credit reporting rules vacated in court, and dollar thresholds in bankruptcy adjust on a schedule. Pages display a last-updated date. High and critical pages are re-verified against primary sources at least twice a year and whenever we learn of a legal change; all other pages at least annually.

Verification cadence and the hard-expiry gate on card and loan data

A last-updated date is not proof by itself that something was rechecked. Card price data on this site is built from individually sourced values, each carrying its own source link and verification date, and the fields that matter most to what a card actually costs are judged against a real calendar deadline, enforced in the publication code itself rather than left to memory — the current numbers, read directly from that code so this page cannot drift from it:

• Annual fee and APR type — re-verify every 7 days; hard-expire at 45 days. A card whose annual fee or APR type has gone unverified past that cutoff is automatically dropped from the card directory, sitemap, schema, and search results — the whole card, not just the stale field — rather than shown with an unconfirmed number.
• Secured-card deposit ranges follow the same rule and the same 45-day cutoff, since a wrong deposit amount is just as costly to a reader as a wrong APR.
• Rewards terms work differently: a card with a rewards program must have at least one specifically-sourced rewards field (not a generic issuer homepage) before it can publish at all — that gate has no expiry date because it never opens in the first place without a real source. A separate, ongoing freshness check also tracks reward data (and the foreign-transaction fee) on a 7-day/60-day cycle for editorial follow-up and this project’s own automated tests, even though that check does not itself remove a card from the live site the way the annual-fee/APR gate does.
• Personal- and auto-loan provider data is dated as a whole research pass rather than field by field: a soft re-check target of 14 days, and a hard expiry of 60 days, past which the entire dataset — every provider in it — stops publishing at once rather than showing a rate nobody can currently vouch for.

We are stating this precisely rather than rounding up: not every field on a card carries the same automatic hard-expiry protection today, and this section names exactly which ones do. A card’s editorial star rating follows a parallel discipline of its own — it displays only once the scoring methodology is complete and the underlying data is adequately complete — never a hand-set number standing in for missing verification.

Correction policy

When we find or are told about an error, we correct the page, update the last-updated date, and — for material errors on legal-risk pages — note the correction on the page. Report errors via the contact page.

Advertising and affiliate relationships

This site may accept advertising and, where a partnership exists, affiliate commissions from card issuers and lenders — see the advertiser disclosure for which relationships exist today. Independence from that revenue is enforced structurally, not by promise:

• Card and category methodology — the rubric, the category weights, and the buyer-beware criteria — is published and versioned in the card methodology before any partnership with that issuer exists.
• Buyer-beware placement is numeric and rule-based: a card lands there because it fails a documented, public threshold, not because of a judgment call a partner could lobby against.
• A partner link earning a commission never changes a score, a rank, review visibility, or the buyer-beware list — the code that computes those values has no field for “is this issuer a partner.”
• A monetized link is marked in two places: a page-top disclosure banner, and a “(partner link)” marker with a sponsored/nofollow tag on the link itself.

AI-assisted content policy

We use AI tools to help draft, structure, and cross-check content. AI assistance never replaces the standards above: every claim is source-checked against the cited primary source by a human before publication, no page ships with fabricated citations, names, or credentials, and AI-generated filler that adds no informational value is deleted. Where AI systems summarize this site, we aim to make their job easy and their output accurate — which is only possible if the underlying pages are accurate.

YMYL compliance approach

This is “Your Money or Your Life” content, and we hold it to that bar: educational framing only (no individualized advice), no outcome guarantees, no score promises, no claims that accurate negative information can be removed, clear disclaimers on every substantive page, and honest prompts about when a licensed attorney or qualified professional is the right next step. We would rather lose a click than mislead a reader.

No-guarantees policy

Nothing on this site guarantees any outcome — not a dispute result, not a score change, not a lawsuit result, not a discharge. Any page that appears to promise an outcome violates these standards; please report it.