Editorial Standards

This page describes how the site is written. It exists so you can check whether it is being followed.

Sourcing

Every number traces to a primary source, and the link is on the page. Tax figures come from the IRS, employment rules from the Department of Labor, credit and identity material from the FTC, deposit insurance from the FDIC. Not from another blog, and not from memory.

Where no reliable figure exists, the page says so. The clearest example is allowance amounts. Every published benchmark comes from a company selling allowance software, drawn from its own subscribers. That is not a national average and this site will not call it one.

Second-hand statistics do not get printed. If a figure is quoted by one site citing another, it stays off until the original is read.

Dating

Every page carries a last checked date, and it means what it says: someone re-read the sources on that date, not that a word was changed.

Tax figures name their tax year in the sentence. The IRS publishes inflation adjustments each autumn for the following year, so at any moment there are two live sets of numbers and mixing them is the most common error in this subject.

Precision about what varies

A great deal in this subject is not uniform, and pages here are required to say so rather than pick the tidy version:

• State law varies on employment, work permits, custodial account ownership, and the age a custodial account transfers. Federal rules are a floor, not the whole answer.
• Institutions vary. No page here says what a bank, brokerage, employer, or school will do, because they differ. It says what to ask.

The connection to the books

The person who writes this site, Jenna Hale, also writes teen life-skills books, and some pages link to them. Three rules govern that:

1. Every page answers its own question in full. Nothing is held back to make a book necessary. A page that does that is a failure of the site’s whole purpose.
2. The connection is stated wherever a book appears, not just in a footer, and not in language designed to be skimmed past.
3. No review markup, no star ratings, no invented testimonials. Reviews controlled by the thing being reviewed are worthless, and marking them up is against Google’s structured data policy anyway.

If a link ever earns a commission, it is marked as a paid link at the link itself and disclosed at the top of the page, per the FTC’s endorsement guides.

Corrections

Errors get fixed and the last-checked date moves. Where a correction changes the substance of what a page told you, a note stays on the page saying what changed and when. Silent edits to substance are not acceptable on a site people make decisions from.

Found something wrong? Send it over.

Use of AI

Drafting, research assistance and formatting on this site involve AI tools. Every factual claim is checked by a human against the linked primary source before it is published, and nothing is published that has not been read end to end. Where a source could not be verified, the page says that rather than filling the gap with a plausible number.