Editorial Policy

Debora Ann Verburgt is written by one person. This page sets out the standards that person tries to meet.

1. Authorship

Every essay on this site is written by Debora Ann Verburgt and published under that name, with a visible publication date. Nothing here is ghostwritten, and nothing is published anonymously. If that ever changes — a guest contributor, for instance — the piece will carry that person's name and a note explaining who they are.

2. What we publish, and what we don't

We publish first-person opinion and commentary about personal finance, taxes, and the paperwork of ordinary adult life. We write about our own experience and what we've concluded from it.

We do not publish: individualised tax or investment advice; predictions about markets; "guaranteed" savings claims; content generated wholesale by an AI system and passed off as the author's own; or anything designed primarily to rank in a search engine rather than to be read.

3. Sourcing

• Where we describe a rule, threshold or deadline, we check it against a primary official source at the time of writing and link to it.
• Where we describe personal experience, we say so plainly. Personal experience is not evidence of a general rule.
• Where we're uncertain, we say we're uncertain rather than writing around it.
• We don't use statistics we haven't traced to a named source.

4. Separating fact from opinion

An essay is an argument. We try to make it obvious which sentences are claims about the world and which are the author's view, and we try to state the strongest version of the opposing case rather than a convenient one. Several essays on this site contain a section doing exactly that.

5. Corrections

We will get things wrong. When we do:

• Factual errors are corrected in the text as soon as we're aware of them.
• A dated correction note is added at the foot of the essay describing what was wrong and what changed.
• Corrections are never made silently, and we don't delete an essay to avoid correcting it.
• If you spot an error, use the contact page. We'd rather know.

6. Updates and old essays

Tax rules change. An older essay reflects what the author understood on its publication date, which is always shown. Where an essay has been substantially revised, we show an updated date as well as the original.

7. Independence

Advertising and affiliate arrangements have no influence on editorial conclusions. Advertisers do not see essays before publication and cannot request changes or removals. Our commercial arrangements are described in the Advertising Disclosure.

8. Use of AI tools

Any AI assistance is limited to mechanical work — spelling, formatting, checking a link resolves. The reporting, reasoning, opinions and prose are written by the named author.

9. Complaints

Write to us using the details on the contact page, quoting the page address and what you think is wrong. We aim to reply within five working days.