Editorial Policy

Editorial Mission

Reduce Your Balances exists to give regular households a clear, honest, and current picture of their options for reducing debt. Our coverage favors approaches with the best track record for ordinary consumers: nonprofit credit counseling and debt management plans where the math works, bankruptcy when it is the cleanest solution, and a skeptical view of consolidation loans, debt settlement, and short-term credit fixes that often look better than they perform. We try to write the page we would have wanted to find ourselves before making the same decision.

We focus on three things on every page: tell readers the most important answer first, support it with specific numbers and primary-source citations, and acknowledge edge cases honestly.

Independence and How the Site Is Funded

Reduce Your Balances has no affiliate relationships, no paid advertising, no sponsored content, and no referral or commission arrangements with any company we review. If you click a link to a debt settlement firm, a credit counseling agency, a tax relief company, or any other business, we receive nothing for that click. Nothing on this site is paid placement.

If this changes in the future, the change will be disclosed here, on the affected review pages, and on every individual article that references the affected company. We commit to making any such disclosure prominent and clear, and to maintaining a "no influence on rankings" rule if affiliate revenue is ever introduced.

The site is operated as an independent publisher and is not affiliated with any debt-relief company, credit counseling agency, tax-relief firm, lender, government agency, or trade association.

Bylines, Credentials, and the Two-Person Rule

Every substantive page on this site is written by the same named writer and reviewed by one of two named reviewers, split by topic. The byline appears under the H1 on every page and the same names appear in the page's JSON-LD structured data so search engines and AI systems can verify the authorship.

The writer: all editorial content is written by Allison N., Finance Writer. Allison's role is to produce the initial draft from research and outlines, verify every factual claim against the primary source, and shepherd the page through reviewer feedback to publication.

The two reviewers, split by topic:

• Nicholas D., Debt Professional reviews everything related to consumer debt products: credit-card debt, personal loans, student loans, home and auto loans, balance transfers, credit counseling, debt management plans, settlement strategy, and the company review listings for settlement and credit counseling. Nicholas also reviews union member guides and Q&A articles in those categories.
• Richard D., Senior Finance Professional reviews everything else: tax debt, bankruptcy, medical debt, legal debts, business debts, collection defense and lawsuits, state debt laws, and the tax-relief company review listings. Richard's 40 years of experience in personal finance and consumer credit anchor the editorial judgment on the highest-stakes financial decisions readers face.

The reviewer's role is substantive, not ceremonial. The reviewer reads the page, checks the math, verifies statute citations against primary sources, flags areas where the editorial stance overstates or understates the data, and signs off before publication. No page goes live without a second set of eyes.

The four legal and policy pages on this site (this Editorial Policy, the Privacy Policy, the Terms of Service, and the Cookie Policy) are organization-issued documents and intentionally carry no personal byline. They are maintained by Reduce Your Balances directly.

AI-Assisted Content Disclosure

We use artificial-intelligence tools, including large language models, as drafting and research aids in the editorial process. AI is one tool among many. Every page goes through human writing, human review, fact-checking against primary sources, and final human editing before publication. The named writer and reviewer on each page are accountable for its accuracy and stand behind its conclusions.

What AI is used for:

• Drafting first versions of explanatory passages from human-supplied outlines and source materials.
• Suggesting structural improvements to existing drafts.
• Locating and summarizing primary-source citations for human verification.
• Producing supporting code that generates structured data such as state-by-state comparison tables.

What AI is not used for:

• Final fact verification. Every statutory citation, dollar figure, statute of limitations, and procedural rule on the site is verified against the primary source by a human before publication. The primary source is then linked from the page.
• Publishing copy with no human review. Nothing on this site has been generated and posted by AI without human editing and approval.
• Personalized advice. The site is informational; AI does not produce personalized financial, legal, or tax recommendations to readers.
• Synthetic reviews or testimonials of any company. We do not publish AI-generated endorsements, which the Federal Trade Commission's 2024 Consumer Reviews and Testimonials Rule (16 C.F.R. Part 465) prohibits in any case.

This disclosure is consistent with current guidance from Google's Search Central documentation, which permits AI use in content production provided the content is helpful, accurate, and people-first, and consistent with Federal Trade Commission guidance that the medium of production is less important than whether the content misleads readers or misrepresents authorship.

How We Review Companies

Company review pages (debt settlement firms, nonprofit credit counseling agencies running debt management plans, tax-relief firms) are evaluated against the same criteria across each category. Every review includes the following data points where publicly available:

• Better Business Bureau rating and accreditation status, read directly from the BBB profile and re-checked annually.
• Industry accreditation: NFCC or FCAA membership for credit counseling agencies; AFCC or IAPDA accreditation for settlement firms; NAEA membership and attorney/EA/CPA staffing disclosure for tax-relief firms.
• Published fee schedules, including setup fees, monthly fees, percentage-of-debt fees, and any tiered pricing.
• State licensing or registration where required, verified against state databases.
• Minimum debt thresholds and program length expectations.
• State availability, verified against the company's own disclosures and state license records.
• Specialty areas where applicable, such as whether a tax-relief firm handles payroll tax (Form 941) or sales tax cases versus only personal income tax.
• Major regulatory actions in the prior five years, if any, drawn from FTC enforcement records, state attorney general settlements, and CFPB consent orders.

Rankings within a category are based on the combination of accreditation, fee structure, transparency, regulatory history, and the editorial judgment that a typical reader would be best served. We do not rank by traffic, by advertising spend, or by any factor that would compromise reader interest. We document our reasoning in each review.

Sources Standard

Our default expectation is that every factual claim in an article be supported by a primary source, linked to the source. Primary sources include federal statutes and regulations (links to law.cornell.edu, ecfr.gov, or the issuing agency), state statutes (links to the state's own legislative website), federal agency guidance (IRS, FTC, CFPB, U.S. Trustee Program, U.S. Courts), state attorney general consumer protection pages, peer-reviewed research, and published industry data where appropriate.

We do not cite competitor lead-gen affiliate pages, opinion blogs, or unsourced industry claims as authority. When statutes change, we update the page and re-date the dateModified field in the page's structured data.

Corrections

If you find an error on the site, write to legal@reduceyourbalances.com. Include the page URL, the specific text, and the correction with a source if you have one. We aim to acknowledge corrections within five business days and publish the correction promptly.

Substantive corrections are noted at the bottom of the affected page with the date of the correction and a short description of what changed. Minor typographical fixes are applied silently. We do not retroactively edit factual claims without noting that the page has been corrected.

How and When We Update Content

Top-level guide pages and state debt-law pages are reviewed at least annually. Pages that depend on quickly changing figures (interest rates, fee schedules, federal student loan repayment plans, IRS quarterly interest rates) are reviewed quarterly. The dateModified field in each page's JSON-LD structured data reflects the date of the most recent substantive review or revision.

We track the freshness of every page in an editorial calendar. When a primary source changes (for example, an IRS quarterly interest-rate update, a state legislative session that adjusts an exemption amount, or a Supreme Court ruling affecting bankruptcy law), affected pages are updated promptly.

Conflicts of Interest

Writers and reviewers do not personally own, work for, consult for, or hold equity in any company reviewed on the site. If a writer or reviewer develops a relationship with a company in any of those categories, they recuse themselves from coverage of that company and the page is reassigned to another credentialed reviewer.

Questions, Concerns, and Tips

For editorial questions, story tips, or feedback on existing content, write to legal@reduceyourbalances.com. We read every message. We may publish reader questions, anonymized and edited for length, in the Q&A library, but only with the writer's permission.

Ethical Foundations

This policy is informed by the editorial standards of established consumer-finance publishers, the Society of Professional Journalists Code of Ethics, the principles of Google's Search Quality Rater Guidelines on Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trust (E-E-A-T), and the Federal Trade Commission's published guidance on truth-in-advertising for educational content.