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Sam Sage

Founder, FinExplained

Sam Sage is an individual investor with more than 20 years of hands-on experience, managing a long-term, buy-and-hold portfolio and running an options wheel strategy of cash-secured puts and covered calls. Sam Sage is not a licensed financial advisor; FinExplained is educational content, not personalized advice.

What FinExplained is

FinExplained is a personal-finance education site built around three formats: original data studies on how American households actually save, invest, and buy homes; calculators that show the formula they run on; and playbooks that walk through a single money decision from start to finish. It is free to read, with no signup and no ads.

The site takes no position on products it cannot verify, and it does not sell anything. Where a question has no single right answer, the page says so and shows what the answer depends on.

How the numbers are produced

Every figure you read here is computed, not typed. One shared calculation engine holds all of the math, so a formula exists in exactly one place and every page that needs it calls the same code. Money math runs on a decimal library rather than ordinary binary floating point, so cents add up exactly.

Each calculator is checked against hand-verified values to the cent, against an independent reimplementation of the same formula, and against roughly a thousand generated cases looking for a result that breaks its own bounds. The published site is then re-checked against the engine, so what a page displays and what the engine computes cannot drift apart. Source data that comes from elsewhere, such as tax tables and market figures, is pinned with its publisher, its period, and a confidence level, and it is refreshed on a stated schedule.

Assumptions are derived from the code that runs, not written from memory, so a page cannot claim behaviour the calculator does not have. Every result is an estimate for education, and none of it is personalized financial advice.

Check the work

  • Methodology the formula behind each calculator, with a worked example and cited sources.
  • How we verify the tests and build gates every figure passes before it reaches a page.
  • Editorial standards how pages are written, what gets cited, and how AI is and is not used.
  • Corrections how to report an error, and where fixes are logged in public.

Elsewhere

FinExplained publishes on two accounts, and these two are the complete set. Anything else carrying the name is not us.