How we get paid

The calculators take nothing from you

Every calculator here runs entirely in your browser. The numbers you type are never sent to us — there is no server to send them to. No account, no email wall, no "enter your details to see your results." You can read the page source and check. That's not generosity; a tool that holds your answer hostage isn't a tool, it's a form.

Where the money comes from

If you choose to be introduced to a financial advisor, the firm pays us a flat referral fee. That's the entire business model. We don't sell ads against this content and we don't sell your information to a lead auction.

The word "flat" is doing real work

We are paid the same amount regardless of which advisor you pick. That means we have no financial reason to point you at one over another, so the match can be about fit.

Compare the largest advisor-matching service in the country. This is their disclosure, verbatim, printed under the first question of their quiz:

"Your advisor matches are chosen based on your location and/or desire to work with remote advisors, as well as your stated amount of assets. We also consider each advisor's advertising budget, therefore advisors with larger budgets are more likely to appear in the results page."

Read that again. The advisors you're shown are partly chosen by how much they paid. It's disclosed, so it's legal, and it's in small grey type under a question about your age. We don't do that, and we've put our version at the top of our quiz instead of the bottom.

The refusal: we take no money from long-term-care insurance

Our tools adjudicate financial decisions. The moment we take money from a company selling one of the products those tools evaluate, the tools stop being trustworthy — not because we'd cheat, but because you'd have no way to know whether we had.

This is the most common conflict in our industry and almost nobody refuses it. Calculators that tell you whether to buy long-term-care insurance are, overwhelmingly, run by people who sell long-term-care insurance. We won't take that money. It's the smallest cheque available to us and turning it down is the only reason to believe anything else on this site.

The part nobody else discloses

Referral fees scale with how much money you have. That gives every free financial tool on the internet the same incentive: show the "talk to an advisor" button to everybody, because the ones with money are worth a lot and the ones without cost nothing to ask.

We don't. Below roughly $500,000 in investable assets we don't show you an advisor offer at all. Most advisors won't take the client, and pretending otherwise wastes your time on the chance of earning us a fee. You get pointed at the free calculators instead, which pay us nothing and are what would actually help.

We'd rather write that down than have you work it out.

What we are not

We're not a financial advisor. We're not a fiduciary to you. Nothing here is a recommendation to buy anything. We don't manage money and never take custody of it. Anyone you're introduced to is a separate firm with their own obligations — ask them directly whether they're a fiduciary at all times, how they're paid, and what it costs. A good advisor answers all three without flinching.

Things we will tell you before you ask

• We earn more when more people take an introduction. A flat fee removes the incentive to steer you to a particular advisor; it does not remove the incentive to steer you to an advisor. That's a real conflict and we're not going to pretend the flat fee solves everything.
• Our calculators are better than the free ones. They are still models, they are still wrong at the edges, and we publish exactly how.
• If a calculator here tells you that you don't need help, that's the calculator working, not breaking.