NewlyHomeowner may earn revenue through affiliate links in its articles, guides, emails, social posts, and direct messages. This page explains those relationships and the rules we hold ourselves to when recommending anything.

Where you will see disclosures

Any article containing an affiliate link carries a disclosure at the top, above the content. Recommendations in other formats carry their own disclosures where you encounter them.

We check articles for affiliate links before publishing. We also review disclosure placement so that readers can see the relationship before following a recommendation.

What an affiliate link is

An affiliate link is a link to a retailer or manufacturer that identifies us as the referrer. If you follow it and buy something, we may receive a commission from the seller.

We do not charge you a fee for using an affiliate link. The seller sets the price, which may vary with the offer, discounts, taxes, or shipping. Check the total and any recurring charges before buying.

The rules we hold ourselves to

These are our own editorial commitments, and they are the reason this page exists in the form it does.

  • A guide has to be useful with every commercial link removed. If deleting the links would gut the article, the article was written backwards, and we do not publish it.
  • Commissions never determine what we recommend. We do not rank by commission rate, and we do not add a product to a guide because a program pays well.
  • We do not invent experience. We do not claim to have tested, installed, used, or lived with a product unless that is true and we can say specifically what was done. Where our guidance rests on manufacturer documentation, standards, or government sources, we cite them.
  • We disclose near the link, not only here. A disclosure buried on a policy page does not tell a reader anything at the moment they are deciding to click. This commitment applies to affiliate recommendations in our articles, PDFs, emails, social posts, and direct messages.
  • We say when we do not know. "We have not tested this" is a complete sentence and we would rather write it than imply otherwise.

Why the disclosure sits at the top

The U.S. Federal Trade Commission requires that a material connection between a publisher and a seller be disclosed clearly and conspicuously, and close to the recommendation it relates to. Canadian law, including the Competition Act and Quebec's consumer protection regime, sets out comparable expectations about not misleading readers as to a commercial relationship.

Both point in the same direction: a reader should know about the relationship before they act on the recommendation. An article starts with a notice; where a recommendation and its link are separated from that notice, we repeat the disclosure close to them.

In an email or direct message containing an affiliate recommendation, we explain the commission relationship alongside the recommendation and before its link or button. For example: "We may earn a commission if you buy through this link." A shortened link, a button label, or a link to this page does not replace that explanation.

Advertising, sponsorship, and gifts

We do not currently run display advertising, and we do not currently accept sponsored posts, paid placements, gifted products, or press samples.

If any of that changes, this page will describe it before it appears on the site, and sponsored material will be labeled as such wherever it appears.

Affiliate programs and networks

We may work with retailers, vendors, and affiliate networks that track referrals and pay commissions. The explanation on this page applies across those relationships; it is not a catalog of every product we mention.

Each affiliate recommendation still identifies the commission relationship where it appears. Where an accepted program agreement requires a particular name or disclosure wording, we include it in the places that agreement requires. Our privacy policy describes how information is handled when you interact with us or follow outside links.

Questions

If something on this site reads like a recommendation and you cannot tell whether we would be paid for it, that is a failure on our part and we want to know. Write to privacy@newlyhomeowner.com.