Last updated: September 2026
At KatchingStacks, our mission is simple: provide honest, plainly written personal finance guidance that helps real people build wealth. This page explains exactly how we research, write, rate, and maintain our content — including where our process has limits.
Our editorial content is written independently of our commercial relationships. Affiliate partnerships, advertising, or sponsored arrangements never influence our ratings, rankings, or written conclusions. We do not accept payment for positive reviews, and no company previews or approves a review before it’s published.
Every product we cover is evaluated against the same core methodology: published fee schedules, account minimums, account terms and disclosures, and platform features, checked directly against the provider’s own site and, where available, its SEC or FINRA filings. Where we or our author hold a personal account with a provider, we incorporate direct, hands-on experience — actual onboarding steps, app navigation, and customer support interactions. Where we don’t hold a personal account, we rely on verified public documentation, user reviews across multiple platforms, and side-by-side comparison against competitors we do have direct experience with — and we say so plainly rather than implying testing we haven’t done.
Reviews and comparisons weigh five factors: cost (management fees, account minimums, and any hidden charges), features (what the platform actually does — tax-loss harvesting, human advisor access, automatic rebalancing), ease of use, customer support quality, and fit (who the product is realistically built for). No single factor decides a rating by itself; a low-cost product with poor support won’t automatically outrank a pricier one with strong service, and we explain that trade-off in the review itself rather than collapsing it into one score.
Financial products change often — fees get restructured, promotional APYs expire, features get added or discontinued. We recheck published rates and fee schedules on a rolling basis and update posts when something material changes. If you notice something out of date, email us at hello@katchingstacks.com and we’ll verify and correct it, typically within a few business days.
When we get something wrong, we fix it and note it. Material errors — incorrect fees, wrong account minimums, factual mistakes about how a product works — are corrected as soon as we can verify the right information. We don’t quietly rewrite past conclusions to match a new affiliate relationship; if a rating changes, it’s because the product or the facts changed, not the commission.
Some links on KatchingStacks are affiliate links, meaning we may earn a commission if you open an account or make a purchase — at no extra cost to you. Compensation may influence which products we cover and how prominently they’re featured, but never our ratings or written assessments. See our full Affiliate Disclosure for details.
Questions about our editorial standards, or think we got something wrong? Email us at hello@katchingstacks.com — we read every message.