How These Tools Are Built

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 in the text next to the sentence it supports, so you can see exactly which claim rests on which reference, and each page also lists its sources together in a Sources section. Between them, the six calculators and seven guides list 122 source citations that point to 107 unique pages.

A typical log entry holds the claim (for example, “Form 1099-DIV is used to report dividends and other distributions”), the source (the IRS page on Form 1099-DIV), the publisher, the source's own date (here, a page the IRS reviewed in May 2026), and the month we checked it (October 2026).

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 monthly vs quarterly dividends 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.