The standards behind every page.

Money Molecule writes about earning more, keeping more, and decoding the products, statements, and bills that surround a normal adult life. Taxes, benefits, retirement accounts, paystubs, mortgages, credit, insurance, banking fees, the fine print on a contract you’re about to sign. North America first — United States and Canada are the markets we cover with verified knowledge today.

What we deliberately don’t cover: picking specific stocks, picking specific cryptocurrencies, get-rich schemes, multi-level marketing, “passive income” pitches, day-trading systems, and the broader genre of financial entertainment dressed up as advice. Those topics are well-served by the rest of the internet. They will not be served here.

Every factual claim on this site is supposed to link to a primary source when one exists. “Primary” means the agency, statute, or filing that actually sets the number, not a news article paraphrasing it. The domains we treat as primary today:

• United States: irs.gov, ssa.gov, cfpb.gov, treasury.gov, federalreserve.gov, sec.gov, dol.gov, medicare.gov, healthcare.gov, and each state’s Department of Revenue / Department of Taxation page.
• Canada: canada.ca (CRA, Service Canada, ESDC), bankofcanada.ca, statcan.gc.ca, osfi-bsif.gc.ca, fcac-acfc.gc.ca, and each provincial finance / revenue ministry.

When a number comes from secondary reporting — a news outlet, a research paper, a private survey — we say so inline so you can weigh it accordingly. We do not link to paywalled sources without flagging the paywall in the same sentence. If the only available source for a claim is paywalled, we either find a primary equivalent or drop the claim.

Every article is read against its cited sources before it publishes. No exceptions, no “we’ll fix it after launch.” If a citation doesn’t actually support the claim, the claim gets rewritten or the link gets corrected before the piece goes live.

The numbers that change yearly — tax brackets, standard deductions, contribution limits, benefit caps, COLA adjustments, RRSP/TFSA/FHSA limits, CPP and EI maximums — are reviewed every January against the official source and updated where they’ve moved. Each page that quotes a year-stamped number displays a Last verified: <date>footer so you can see whether you’re looking at a freshly checked page.

Calculators are sanity-checked against at least one independent external calculator before launch — typically the official one (the IRS withholding estimator, the CRA payroll calculator) plus a respected third party. If our number and theirs disagree by more than rounding error, the calculator doesn’t ship until we know why.

Every calculator on this site shows its formula, the assumptions it makes, and the things it deliberately ignores. The Raise Calculator ignores stock comp. The Mortgage Decoder ignores property tax variations between municipalities. The TFSA-vs-RRSP tool assumes a single marginal rate today and a single marginal rate at withdrawal. You’ll see those caveats on the page, not buried in a footnote.

Outputs are labeled honestly: “estimate,” “range,” “rough.” You will not see the words “guaranteed,” “projected return,” or any other phrase that would imply we know what your actual future looks like. We don’t.

The chat assistant on this site is named Molecule and is powered by Anthropic’s Claude. The chat panel header says “Ask Molecule.” The footer of the panel reads “Money Molecule is an AI and can make mistakes.” If you ask Molecule directly whether it’s a human, it will tell you it isn’t.

Molecule answers from our verified knowledge base first. When a strong match exists in the KB, the answer cites the official source URL (irs.gov, ssa.gov, canada.ca, etc.) at the bottom. When the KB doesn’t have a strong match — or when the question is about a fast-changing live figure like today’s rate — Molecule falls back to web search, marks the answer live, and cites the web source.

Articles, by contrast, are not AI-drafted. The byline reads “Written by the MoneyMolecule team,” which means human editorial: a person wrote it, a person edited it, a person checked the sources. Full Molecule disclosure is at AI & Molecule.

Substantive errors get a dated correction note at the bottom of the original piece — what was wrong, what we changed, when. We do not silently edit the record. The full log lives at /corrections.

“Substantive” means a factual error a reader could act on — a wrong tax bracket, a broken contribution limit, a calculator output that’s materially off. Typo fixes, broken-link repairs, and minor copyedits don’t get a log entry; substantive errors always do.

Articles today are signed “by the MoneyMolecule team” — an editorial-team byline that reflects the way the site is written today: small team, every piece reviewed before it ships.

As we add named writers and credentialed reviewers — CPAs in the US, CPAs in Canada, CFPs, enrolled agents — each piece will surface the human who reviewed it, with their credential. That’s the direction; the team byline is the start.