Editorial standards

How Aplomia articles get written.

The bylines on this site say “Reviewed by the Aplomia editorial team.” This page explains what that means in practice — the principles, the cadence, and the things we deliberately don’t do.

01 — Principles

Six rules every article gets checked against.

These aren’t aspirational. Each one is a structural check that happens before a draft moves to publish.

  • 01

    Plain English first

    Articles are written for a reader who hasn't taken a finance class. Jargon is defined the first time it appears or replaced with the everyday word. If a sentence requires a glossary, we rewrite the sentence.

  • 02

    Numbers come from cited sources

    Every quantitative claim — a bracket, a rate, a wage cap — links back to a public source (an IRS publication, a state Department of Revenue page, a Federal Reserve dataset). The Methodology page lists those sources for the calc engine. Articles that introduce additional numbers cite them inline.

  • 03

    Estimates are framed as estimates

    Take-home pay, debt payoff timelines, refi break-even — all of these depend on assumptions. We name those assumptions in the article and remind readers that their numbers will vary. We don't quote a number to the cent and let the reader assume it's exact.

  • 04

    No advice, ever

    Aplomia is not a financial advisor, planner, lender, broker, or tax professional. Articles explain how things work; they don't tell readers what to do. The editorial bar is: would a fiduciary advisor feel comfortable with this paragraph? If the answer is no, we cut it or reframe it.

  • 05

    No affiliate spam

    We don't take commissions on credit cards, loans, or financial products mentioned in articles. We have no affiliate relationships in any category covered by editorial content. Our revenue comes from advisors who license the embed surface — see the For Advisors page for the model.

  • 06

    Updates are dated

    Every article header shows the last-updated date. When tax tables, rates, or rules change, articles that reference them get updated and re-dated. If a referenced rule was changed by legislation, the article notes the change with the effective date.

02 — Publishing cadence

One new article a week, on average.

We’d rather publish one carefully-checked article per week than five rushed ones. The cadence is:

  • We publish a new article approximately every Tuesday.
  • Articles run 800-1500 words, typically 5-6 minutes to read.
  • Each article links to the tool that lets you apply the idea to your own numbers.
  • Article topics are chosen from reader questions, tool-usage patterns, and the gaps we find when reviewing existing coverage.

The Articles index always shows the most recent publishing date at the top, so you can see whether the cadence is holding.

03 — Review process

What “reviewed by the editorial team” means.

Every article goes through the same checks before it goes live:

  • Numeric review. Any quantitative claim is verified against a cited public source. Numbers that come from our calc engine are run against the current production version so the article and the tool agree.
  • Language review. An automated lint rule blocks the advisor-language patterns most likely to imply regulated financial advice — phrases that recommend specific actions, frame an option as the top pick for the reader, or claim to provide individualized counsel. Any draft that fails this check is rewritten before it can be published.
  • Compliance review. A human checks that the framing stays educational and that the disclaimer at the bottom is present. The site-wide disclaimer is structural — it appears on every article via the article layout, not a copy-paste step.
  • Tool-link check.If the article references a specific calculation, the call-to-action card at the bottom must link to the tool that performs that calculation. Articles without a tool link aren’t published on the site.
04 — What we don’t do

The things you won’t find on this site.

Most personal finance sites do at least one of these. We’ve made a deliberate choice not to.

  • Personalized recommendations

    Nothing on the site recommends a specific product, lender, or course of action for an individual reader. We explain mechanisms; readers make decisions.

  • Stock or asset picks

    Articles don't tell readers which stocks, funds, ETFs, or crypto assets to buy or sell. Investment selection is outside our scope and outside our license to opine on.

  • Get-rich-quick framing

    We don't promise outsized returns, hidden shortcuts, or strategies that beat "what advisors don't want you to know." The math of personal finance is mostly boring; we keep the framing honest about that.

  • SEO-keyword stuffing

    We don't pad articles with synonym lists, fake FAQs, or AI-generated filler to rank for search terms. Each article is written to be useful to a reader who already searched — not to game the search.

05 — Flagging errors

If you spot something wrong, tell us.

If a number in an article looks wrong, an explanation contradicts your experience, or a sentence reads like advice when it shouldn’t — email brendan@aplomia.com with the article URL and what you noticed.

We fix confirmed errors within 5 business days and add a dated correction note at the bottom of the affected article. Errors in the calc engine itself go to methodology-brendan@aplomia.com — see the Methodology page for how those get triaged.

We’d rather hear about a small typo than ship a wrong number to the next reader.