Privacy Policy
RetirementCheck101 publishes original research and education on retirement rules. It is not an investment adviser and is not affiliated with one. We do not recommend securities, and using this site creates no advisory relationship; nothing here is investment, tax, or legal advice.
We test different versions of these pages with different groups of readers, and we measure which versions people actually find useful. That is the main reason we collect anything at all, because a site that cannot tell what helps its readers cannot get better at helping them. State privacy laws also require us to say what we collect and why, and federal law holds us to whatever we say here. Everything below is the complete list rather than a summary of it.
What we collect
Every page on this site records the visit: the page you viewed, the date and time, the address of the page that referred you, your browser’s user agent string, your Internet Protocol address, and any campaign tags carried by the link you followed. Two cookies are placed in your browser on your first visit; one records where you came from, and the other holds a randomly generated identifier that lets us recognize a returning reader as one person rather than as several. That identifier is random, and it is not derived from your name, your email address, or anything else about you or your device.
If you ask for a report or a download, we collect your email address and record whether you confirmed it, so that an address is never added on someone else’s behalf. If you create an account, we also collect your name and a cryptographically hashed version of your password, which we cannot recover and can only help you replace.
If you complete the retirement worksheet, we store your answers, which include your age, filing status, state, balances, income, and assumptions. We use them to preserve your work and to produce your report. We also study them in aggregate, alongside everyone else’s, to understand how households actually save, spend, and are taxed in retirement. Findings group people by characteristics such as age, filing status, state, and income range, and they never identify anyone. Your report is never reproduced for another person, and no part of it is ever shared as yours.
If you complete a form on one of our professional pages, we collect what you enter there.
We do not collect payment information, government identifiers, account numbers, or credentials for any financial institution, and you should never send them to us. We do not knowingly collect information from children under thirteen. We never send your name, your email address, your Internet Protocol address, or your worksheet answers to Google Analytics.
Who else can see it
Our application and its database are hosted by Replit, records are copied into Google Sheets for analysis, measurement uses Google Analytics, and email is delivered by Resend. Each of them processes data on our behalf and under contract.
We do not sell your personal information, and we do not share it with advertisers, data brokers, or list buyers.
We do not share it with financial advisers, accountants, or any other professional. Where we ask whether you would like to be contacted by one, your answer is recorded and honored; declining is the default, and not answering means no. If we ever begin sharing information with a professional, we will ask your permission first in specific terms, and update this policy before doing so.
We will disclose information if the law requires it, or if disclosure is necessary to protect the safety of a person or the integrity of our systems.
We publish research drawn from this data in aggregate. Findings may report what groups of readers answered, how often a particular question arises, or how a rule affects a population; they never identify an individual, and we do not publish email addresses, worksheet answers, or anything else traceable to a person.
How long we keep it
Visit records, including Internet Protocol addresses, are kept for as long as they remain useful for measuring how this site is found and used; we have not set a fixed deletion date for them, and we would rather tell you that plainly than publish a schedule our systems do not enforce. Email addresses and account information are kept until you ask us to delete them. Worksheet answers are deleted along with the account that holds them.
Your choices
Write to admin@financialcheckup101.com to receive a copy of the information we hold about you, to correct it, or to delete it, and we will respond within thirty days; we will first ask you to confirm control of the email address in question, because that is our only way to know the request is genuinely yours. Several states grant these rights by statute, and we honor them for every reader rather than only for residents of those states.
Deleting your account permanently deletes your worksheet answers and your saved reports, and we cannot restore them afterward. You can refuse or delete cookies through your browser’s settings; the site remains fully usable, and the only consequence is that we lose the ability to connect your visit to the campaign that produced it.
Security
Passwords are stored as cryptographic hashes rather than as text, traffic to this site is encrypted, and access to the database and to our spreadsheets is limited to people who need it. No system is perfectly secure, and we will not tell you otherwise; if we discover a breach affecting your information, we will notify you and the appropriate authorities as the law requires.
Changes and contact
Any change to this policy is posted here with a new effective date, and a change that materially affects information we already hold will be stated plainly rather than left for you to notice. Questions about this policy, and requests concerning your information, go to admin@financialcheckup101.com.