How These Tools Are Built
Financial calculators are easy to build and easy to get wrong. A formula that looks right can be off by a compounding period, and a statistic that was true last year can quietly stop being true without anything on the page changing. This is how the tools and guides here are put together, and what gets deliberately left out.
Our standards
Every factual claim is traced to a source
Claims aren't written from memory. Each one is checked against a published source, and the source, its publisher, its date, and the date we checked it are recorded in an internal log. That log also tracks which claims are time-sensitive and need re-checking.
Where a source exists, it's linked inline in the text rather than dumped in a list at the bottom, so you can see exactly which sentence rests on which reference. Across the site there are currently 221 outbound citations.
Primary sources beat summaries
For anything regulatory, the primary document wins. The dividend tax guide is built on IRS Topic 404, Publication 550 and the Form 1099-DIV instructions rather than second-hand explainers. The Dividend Aristocrats guide uses the S&P Dow Jones Indices fact sheet, not blog summaries of it.
This matters more than it sounds. Secondary sources routinely paraphrase a threshold slightly wrong, and a paraphrase of a paraphrase drifts further.
Our own calculations get published with the method
Some pages contain arithmetic we ran ourselves rather than figures we found. When that happens, the formula is shown so you can reproduce it, and the result is cross-checked against published figures where any exist.
The compounding-frequency table in the payment frequency guide is an example: the method is printed alongside it, and its numbers reproduce figures published elsewhere to within a rounding difference. If a calculation can't be checked against anything, that's stated too.
When sources disagree, we say so
Plenty of financial topics are genuinely contested. Yield on cost has credible commentators calling it essential and others calling it useless. Sources report the Dividend Aristocrats index as rebalancing both annually and quarterly.
The approach is to describe the disagreement and, where possible, work out why it exists, rather than pick one side quietly and present it as settled.
Calculators state what they don't do
Every calculator here has a section listing its limits. What it ignores, what it assumes, and where the result stops being reliable. A projection that assumes a constant growth rate for thirty years is a planning estimate, not a forecast, and the page says so rather than implying precision it doesn't have.
What we deliberately leave out
Some of the most-searched figures in this subject are absent from this site on purpose. Competitors publish them freely. They go stale invisibly, which is the problem.
- Tax bracket amounts and income thresholds. These are adjusted regularly. The tax guide explains the rate structure and sends you to IRS.gov for current figures.
- What counts as a "good" dividend yield or growth rate. Widely published, rarely sourced to anything. The tools let you enter your own assumption instead.
- Per-company statistics. Yields, payout ratios and dividend histories for named stocks change constantly, so no page quotes them as fact.
- Market averages. Index yields and long-run inflation figures move, and a number that's correct on publication day becomes wrong without warning.
- Review scores and star ratings. There is no ratings markup on this site because there are no reviews. Adding it would be inventing trust.
The tradeoff is real: leaving these out costs search visibility. It also means a page that was accurate when written stays accurate.
On AI assistance
Drafting, research and code on this site are produced with AI assistance. That's worth stating plainly rather than leaving you to wonder.
What it doesn't mean is unchecked output. The verification described above exists precisely because AI-drafted text needs it: every calculation on this site was independently computed and cross-checked before publishing, sources were retrieved and read rather than recalled, and claims that couldn't be traced to a source were removed instead of hedged. Errors found during that process are corrected and logged, including errors in earlier drafts of these same pages.
It also isn’t written by someone with no stake in the subject. These calculators started as spreadsheets kept for a real portfolio, and the person behind the site has been investing in dividend stocks since 2019. That doesn’t make anything here advice, but it does mean the questions the tools answer are questions actually worth answering.
The tools themselves are ordinary arithmetic running in your browser. Nothing on this site uses AI to generate the numbers you see.
Corrections
If something here is wrong, we want to know, and it will be fixed rather than quietly left. Quoting the page and the specific sentence makes it far faster to check.
Use the contact form. Corrections are the most useful message this site can receive.
More about this site
Read about who builds these tools, browse the calculators, or start with the guides.
Disclaimer: Everything on this site is for informational and educational purposes only and is not financial, investment, or tax advice. Careful sourcing reduces the chance of error; it does not eliminate it, and it does not make any projection a prediction. Always consult a qualified financial or tax professional before making decisions.
Last updated: August 2, 2026