This page describes how PayoffPath is researched, written, reviewed and corrected. It is written down so that it can be held against us.
Sourcing
Statements of law and of federal policy are sourced to primary material: the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the Federal Trade Commission, the United States Courts, the IRS, the Federal Reserve and state statutes. We link the source, not a secondary article about the source.
There is one exception, and it is the only one. In the two state-by-state reference lists — the statute of limitations on debt and the bankruptcy exemptions — thirteen state statutes are cited to FindLaw’s reproduction of the statutory text rather than to the state legislature’s own page. FindLaw is a secondary host of the primary text, not a secondary article about it, and in every one of the thirteen the statute’s own citation is printed as the link itself, so it can be checked against any other copy of that state’s code. Moving those thirteen to the states’ own pages is outstanding work, and this paragraph stays here until it is done.
Numbers
Two rules. First, every payoff calculation states its interest rate and its assumptions and is reproducible from them. Second, market figures that move over time — average card APR, household debt, approval rates — are not asserted from memory. They are linked to the agency that publishes them, or they are left out.
Where a figure varies by state, such as a statute of limitations or a bankruptcy exemption, we explain the mechanism and send you to the statute. We will not publish a fifty-state table we cannot keep current, because in this subject a stale table is worse than no table.
Independence
No advertiser, affiliate or sponsor sees an article before publication, and none has any input into its conclusions. See the Advertiser Disclosure.
Corrections
When we get something wrong we fix it in place and add a dated correction note. We do not quietly delete errors. Report one through the contact page.
Publication dates
Most of this site was published on a single day. Forty of the fifty-two guides here carry a publication date of 6 August 2026, because that is when the first batch went live; the rest went up one at a time between 19 August and 2 September 2026. They were researched and written over the weeks before it and uploaded together, which is why the dates line up the way they do.
That is worth saying plainly rather than leaving you to notice it. A run of identical dates is what a content farm looks like from the outside, and the only honest defense is the material itself: the sources are linked, the figures are checkable, and where a number comes from a federal data release it was recalculated here rather than copied. Read the guides against their sources, not against their timestamps.
The dates will not be rewritten to look more organic. Spreading them backwards across weeks would misrepresent, in machine-readable data, when this material was actually published. The publication date says when a guide went up; the modified date says when it was last checked or corrected, and that one moves whenever something here changes.
Use of AI
We use software in research and drafting. It does not decide what is true here: every factual claim is checked against a primary source by a person before publication, and the sourcing and accuracy standards above apply regardless of how a draft was produced.