What this covers
This applies across the site, but it matters most on the guides that cite a specific law, regulatory threshold, filing deadline, or dollar figure -- both the personal-budgeting guides that touch tax rules (freelancer set-asides, the 1099-K threshold) and the smaller, older cluster of app-store age-verification compliance guides described on the About page. Guides that don't cite a law or a specific figure -- most of the seasonal and life-event budgeting guides -- don't need this treatment and don't claim it.
How we source factual claims
Every factual claim on this site about a law, a regulatory threshold, a filing deadline, or a specific dollar figure is traced to a primary source -- the statute or bill text itself, the government agency's own page, or the relevant IRS or state publication -- rather than to news coverage, a secondary blog post, or another site's summary. Where a guide references a specific bill, we cite the bill number and, where one exists, the government site hosting its text (for example, leginfo.legislature.ca.gov for California legislation), not a third party's paraphrase of it.
Re-verification before publication
Dates, thresholds, and dollar figures are checked against the primary source again immediately before a guide is published or updated -- not copied forward from an earlier draft, and not assumed to match a related guide on this site just because the topics are similar.
"As of" dates
Every guide's page carries a datePublished and dateModified date in its
structured data (viewable in the page source), so it's possible to tell when a page's claims were
last checked. Guides that cite a law, threshold, or figure that can change also say so in the
visible text -- either with a specific date a citation was checked against the primary source, or
with an explicit "as of this writing" caveat tied to that publish date -- and tell you to
re-verify the figure yourself before relying on it for a real decision, because rules like these
do change, sometimes more than once.
When a source is unsettled or doesn't say something
If a law hasn't taken effect yet, is under amendment, or a primary source simply doesn't state something we'd otherwise want to tell you, the guide says that directly instead of filling the gap with a guess presented as fact. Several of the app-compliance guides walk through how to re-verify a cited date yourself, precisely because those dates have moved before and may move again.
What this doesn't mean
Careful sourcing isn't the same as professional review. No named individual with a professional credential reviews these guides, and nothing here is personalized financial, tax, or legal advice. See About for more on what we don't claim.
Corrections
When we're told about a factual error -- a wrong figure, an outdated date, a broken citation -- we
check it against the primary source and, if it's wrong, fix the page and update its
dateModified date. We don't quietly rewrite a page to erase that something was
wrong; the fix is the correction.
How to report an error
This site doesn't yet have a dedicated contact form. The most reliable way to reach us right now is to message DeskLark Studio through our Etsy shop -- tell us which page and what looks wrong, and ideally include the primary source you think we should be citing instead. We read shop messages regularly.