Editorial Policy

Who writes MoneyPilot

MoneyPilot is produced by an in-house editorial team that specializes in explaining consumer finance in plain English. The team is responsible for every guide, calculator methodology, and comparison on the site, and articles carry the "MoneyPilot Editorial Team" byline to reflect that shared accountability.

Guides that involve numbers, formulas, or regulatory detail are additionally checked by a financial reviewer — a person with relevant professional qualifications — before they are marked as reviewed. When an article has been through that step, the reviewer is named in the byline and the "Fact-checked" date is shown.

How we research and write a guide

We follow the same process for every explainer:

• Topic selection: we start from questions people actually search for, using autocomplete and search-volume data, and we favor questions that are under-served by clear, source-backed answers.
• Source gathering: we collect primary sources first — the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the Federal Reserve and FRED, the FDIC and NCUA, the SEC and Investor.gov, the IRS, and the Bureau of Labor Statistics — plus current provider disclosures where a specific rate or term is involved.
• Drafting: a draft is written from those sources in our own words. We use AI tools to help assemble sources and produce a first draft; nothing is published from an AI draft alone.
• Fact-check: an editor re-checks every figure against its original source, confirms each claim links to the specific page that supports it (not a homepage), re-does any arithmetic in worked examples, and removes anything that reads as advice, prediction, or a product recommendation.
• Editorial review: the draft is held in an internal review queue. It is only published once an editor has signed off. Guides with methodology or math also go to a financial reviewer.
• Publication and dating: the article shows its publication date, its last-updated date, and — where applicable — its fact-checked date.

How we use AI

We use AI tools to help research primary sources and produce first drafts. No article is published from an AI draft alone, and no page goes live without a human editor checking it against the process above.

We verify each figure against its original source, confirm the sources are cited and linked, correct tone and accuracy, and reject drafts that do not add original value beyond what the sources already say. The editorial team is responsible for everything we publish.

We do not publish auto-generated pages at scale, we do not spin or lightly reword other sites, and we do not create content whose main purpose is to manipulate search rankings.

Keeping content current

Evergreen guides are reviewed on a rolling basis and whenever a rule, limit, or rate they cite changes — for example when the IRS updates contribution limits or a deposit-insurance figure changes. Interest-rate and market figures used as examples are labeled as illustrative and dated.

If you find something out of date, tell us using the link on our Contact page and we will check it.

Independence

Editorial decisions are made independently of any advertiser or affiliate partner. Affiliate relationships never determine which products we cover, how we rank them, or what we write.

When a page contains affiliate links, it carries a clear disclosure. Sponsored content, if we ever publish it, will be labeled as sponsored.

Corrections

If we find an error — or you tell us about one — we correct it promptly and note the correction on the Corrections page. Material corrections are marked on the affected article.

Report an error at the address on our Contact page. Please include the page URL and what you believe is incorrect.