Editorial standards

Every guide on this site is written to the rules below. They are published because a page about money should be checkable, and because "trust us" is not an argument.

Who writes these guides

All of them are written by Deniss, the independent developer who built and maintains this site.

That is the whole byline, and the honest version of it. We are not regulated financial advisers, we hold no insurance licence, and nothing here is financial advice. No insurer, broker or comparison site has written, reviewed, sponsored or approved any of it.

What we offer instead of credentials is a method you can audit. The calculator's formula and its rate tables are published in the about page and visible in the site's source. Every figure quoted in a guide is either computed from those same tables or attributed to a named official source below. If the arithmetic is wrong, it is wrong in a way you can find and tell us about.

Where the figures come from

There are three kinds of number on this site, and they are held to different standards.

Tax, benefit and threshold figures are taken from the responsible government body in each market and nowhere else — not from insurers, not from comparison sites, not from other blogs:

Market	Sources used
United Kingdom	HMRC (inheritance tax, policies in trust), GOV.UK (bereavement support payment)
United States	IRS (Publication 525, estate tax), SSA (survivor benefits)
Sweden	Skatteverket (arvsskatt, kapitalinkomst), Pensionsmyndigheten (efterlevandepension), Konsumenternas Försäkringsbyrå
Norway	Skatteetaten (arveavgift, formuesskatt), NAV (etterlattepensjon, omstillingsstønad), Finansportalen
Denmark	Skattestyrelsen (boafgift, afgift på pensionsudbetalinger), Borger.dk (arveregler), STAR (efterlevelseshjælp), ATP (engangsbeløb ved død)
Finland	Verohallinto / vero.fi (perintövero, pääomatulon verotus, henkivakuutuksen verotus), Kela and the earnings-related pension providers (leskeneläke, lapseneläke), Tapaturmavakuutuskeskus (työntekijäin ryhmähenkivakuutus), Tilastokeskus (ansiotaso)

Premium figures are illustrative estimates from the site's own published rate table, not quotes. They answer "roughly £15 a month or roughly £150?" and nothing finer. Real pricing depends on underwriting — health, family history, occupation, build — and two insurers can price the same applicant very differently. Wherever a guide states a price, it is computed from the same table the calculator uses, so the prose and the tool cannot drift apart.

Rules of thumb (10× income, 100 månadslöner, 3–5× årslønn) are reported as what they are: conventions in common use in that market, with their limitations stated. We do not present a rule of thumb as a recommendation.

How a guide is checked before it is published

Every factual claim is traced to one of the sources above, or dropped.
Every worked example is recomputed against the live calculator. If the article and the tool disagree, the article is wrong.
Market-specific claims are checked against that market's own rules rather than translated from the English version. Swedish and Norwegian guides are written for those markets, not machine-translated — the state already provides different things in each country, and that changes the answer.
Anything we could not verify is either stated as uncertain or left out.

Dates on articles

Each guide shows when it was published and, where it applies, when it was last revised.

The revision date only moves when the content actually changes. A rebuild of the site, a design tweak, or a typo fix does not touch it. This matters more than it sounds: stamping every page with today's date on every deployment is a way of telling search engines that nothing on the site can be trusted to mean what it says.

Corrections

If a figure is wrong, a threshold has changed, or a guide has gone stale, tell us: hello@lifecovercalc.com.

Factual errors are fixed as soon as they are confirmed.
A correction that changes a number a reader might have acted on is noted on the page, with the date.
We do not quietly rewrite an article and leave the original date on it.

Independence and funding

The site is funded entirely by Google AdSense advertising. We sell no insurance, take no commission, and hold no affiliate arrangements with any insurer or broker.

This is the part that most affects what you are reading. A site paid per lead has a financial interest in your recommended cover being larger; a site paid per click does not. The calculator has no product to sell you at the end of it — it produces a number, and the number is the whole output. If that funding model ever changes, this page and the about page will say so before anything else does.