Methodology
Separate evidence, calculation and opinion.
Financial guidance is more useful when users can tell which statements come from authoritative sources, which are deterministic calculations, and which are ShareCapsule planning judgments.
How a guide page is prepared
Each page starts with a practical question such as controlling revolving credit, sizing liquidity, organizing expenses or choosing an investment category by time horizon.
For U.S. household-finance topics, primary sources such as CFPB, SEC/Investor.gov, IRS, FDIC, BLS, HealthCare.gov and NAIC are preferred for rules, limits, consumer guidance and public benchmark data.
When ShareCapsule recommends an order of operations or planning threshold, it is labeled as “ShareCapsule opinion” rather than presented as a law, regulation or universal rule.
Targets such as emergency-fund months, spending percentages or portfolio mixes depend on household circumstances. The guide uses ranges and decision factors where a single number would be misleading.
Annual limits, tax thresholds, insurance limits and other changing values should include the applicable year and be rechecked against the current primary source.
Editorial review checks whether a recommendation could be inappropriate when debt costs, liquidity, taxes, insurance, time horizon or household obligations are considered together.
Financial Health peer benchmark
The Financial Health page uses a ShareCapsule regionalized income peer estimate, not a universal recommended budget. The current benchmark starts with U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics Consumer Expenditure Surveys 2023 national income-quintile means and the 2023 Census-region means from the same annual report.
For each expense measure, ShareCapsule calculates a regional factor: region mean ÷ U.S. mean. It then multiplies the matching national income-quintile mean by that factor. In simplified form: peer estimate(category) = income-quintile mean(category) × region mean(category) ÷ U.S. mean(category).
This produces a transparent estimate for the user’s income level and Census region. It is not the official BLS region-by-income cross-tabulation. BLS publishes exact two-year cross-tabulated tables separately, and ShareCapsule can replace the estimate with an audited exact cross-tab dataset later without changing the local comparison model.
Review labels
| Label | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Prepared by | The ShareCapsule team responsible for research, drafting and page maintenance. |
| Editorially reviewed by | An internal review for source quality, factual consistency, calculations and clear separation of official guidance from ShareCapsule opinion. |
| Independent professional review | Used only when a qualified external reviewer has actually reviewed the stated scope. Credentials and scope should be disclosed. |
| Last reviewed | The date the page was most recently checked for content and source currency. |
Planner recommendations
The private planner is designed to use transparent deterministic rules for its core recommendations. For example, it can flag a high-APR debt balance, a low emergency reserve or an expense-category trend based on values stored in the user’s local encrypted vault.
Where a calculation depends on assumptions, those assumptions should be visible. Where a decision requires facts the planner does not know, the output should say so rather than pretending certainty.
The right goal is not to make the planner sound more confident. It is to make the reasoning inspectable enough that the user can understand why an action was suggested.