The first principle behind every piece on Ledgerline: if a number appears in an article, we've traced it back to where it actually comes from — a bank's own rate sheet, a cardholder agreement, or a lender's fee schedule. Not a press release, not a roundup on another site, and not a number that "sounds about right" from general familiarity with a product category.
Press releases and marketing pages are written to make a rate or a card look as good as possible — that's their job. They highlight the best-case number and leave the conditions attached to it for a footnote, or for the actual disclosure document most readers never open. A rate that's technically true only for the first 90 days, or only above a certain balance, reads identically to an unconditional rate in a headline. The difference only shows up in the fine print.
In practice, this means before a number goes into an article, we check for:
It doesn't mean every article is a line-by-line legal breakdown of a disclosure document — that would be unreadable for most people, and isn't the point. It means the plain-English explanation in the article is built on top of what the disclosure actually says, so the takeaway holds up even for the reader who never opens the original document themselves.
This is one of three principles behind how Ledgerline works. The other two: how we handle rankings and why every piece ends with a decision, not just more information.