Accurate. Authoritative. Approachable.
Our editorial policy
At Human Interest, it’s our mission to make it easy for people in all lines of work to save for retirement. In addition to offering powerful retirement savings tools, like our modern 401(k) and 403(b), we believe that access to high-quality information about navigating the long journey to and through retirement (and how to help employees on that journey) will help to create a more financially secure future for everyone.
Whether it’s on our website, in our articles, or in our newsletter, we aim to release that is accurate, authoritative, and approachable.
Information you can trust
Navigating retirement plans and savings can be complex and confusing. We believe that retirement savers are seeking access to accurate financial content so they can make their lives—and futures—better.
That’s why we’re committed to the following…
Core principles
Accuracy. We strive to cite original, primary sources, vet our sources, and regularly update our content. We are committed to producing content that equips our readers with the information they need to feel confident in making financial decisions.
Authority. We work with internal researchers, writers, and subject matter experts who hold industry credentials (e.g. CPA, CFA, QPA, QKC, QKA, CMFC, CRPS, CEBS) and, collectively, have several decades of experience in topics ranging from accounting to retirement plan design to ERISA law. Together, our team collaborates to research, draft, fact-check, and rigorously review our content, helping to make sure it’s valid and accurate before publishing it. When necessary, we also include external parties in our writing and review process. We leverage expert guidance to help craft our content, especially when it comes to providing examples and transparently sharing what those assumptions are.
Approachability. Our content is designed to be educational, which means we do our best to break down tough, complex topics so they’re easier to understand. Our goal is to outline both the fundamentals and key decisions so that individual readers can tailor the content to their own situations. At the top of our articles, we often use key takeaways and other tactics to summarize and organize some of these points.
Editorial process
Whether we’re writing educational content for our customers, their employees, or people who are searching online for information about 401(k)s and retirement, each draft we produce is held to the following standards:
Research, sources, and citations. Our writers, which may include Human Interest employees, freelance contractors, and other third-party vendors seek out quality information from reputable sources that we believe our readers can trust. We’ll always tell you where our information comes from, including the year it was released.
Our customer data. When it comes to choosing data, sometimes we’ll look to our own customer base, representing 25,000+ businesses and hundreds of thousands of employees) since there may not be current, publicly available information about small businesses’ retirement plans, for example. We may use anonymized, aggregate data about our small and midsized business customers and their hundreds of thousands of employees. We do this to elevate the industry’s understanding that retirement savings access, participation, and behaviors may be different from trends they see in data released from large financial institutions, which tend to focus on larger, enterprise-level plans with thousands of employees and millions of assets under management. Read more about how we protect the data of our customers and their employees in our privacy policy.
Industry research. Other times we rely on data points and information released by third parties, including government agencies such as the IRS, Department of Labor, and the Government Accountability Office as well as state entities; academic institutions and think tanks, such as the Boston College Center for Retirement Research, the Georgetown Center for Retirement Initiatives; journalists working for reputable publications, like the New York Times or Wall Street Journal; or industry publications like Society for Human Resources Management, PlanSponsor, or 401k Specialist; and, sometimes where we want to see other trends across the industry, large, legacy financial institutions like Vanguard or Fidelity who serve millions.
Reviews and our editorial team. We have a robust internal process and team conducting cross-functional reviews of all content on this site (including editorial, brand, product, ERISA, and, when relevant, registered investment advisory oversight). We thoroughly review our content to ensure that it is of sufficient quality to publish. Our reviewers typically include those with subject matter expertise in our product, retirement plan administration, relevant regulatory matters, investing, editing, translation, and other areas of specialty across the industry. Through our review process, we seek to:
Present information that’s down-to-earth, fair, and balanced and clearly explains jargon and industry terms.
Use the most recent and accurate facts and figures.
Ensure third-party sources are relevant and disclosed.
Point to original sources of third-party data (not citations of citations)
Include notes on the methodology, data collection, or assumptions when relevant.
Do not give specific investment, legal, or tax advice. Instead, our aim is to equip readers with fundamentals and outline key considerations and decisions for each reader to consider.
Corrections and updates. We strive to routinely roll out updates to our content via our writers, editors, and web team to help ensure it is up-to-date. You can see the date that any article was updated at the top of each page. From time to time, we remove content, for example, when it becomes irrelevant or inaccurate. In those situations, we may redirect a reader to another relevant page or section of our website. If you find an error in our content, please let us know.
