How we make money

The loan request form

Our get started page has a form where a visitor can submit a request for a personal or installment loan. When you submit that form, your request is passed to a network of lenders. If a lender in that network accepts your request, we may be paid a referral fee by the network.

That fee is paid to us by the network, never charged to you, and it does not change the offer a lender makes. We are not involved in whether a lender accepts your request, what rate or terms it offers, or how it makes that decision. The lender you're ultimately matched with, not this site, is the one setting your loan's terms.

Affiliate links

Some articles include links to lenders or financial products. If you click one of these links and go on to use that product, we may earn an affiliate commission. This works the same way as the loan request form: the commission is paid by the lender or network, not by you, and it doesn't change what you're offered.

Affiliate Disclosure: This website contains affiliate links. If you click through and make a purchase or sign up for a service, we may receive a commission at no additional cost to you. We only recommend products and services we believe will provide value to our readers. Our editorial content is not influenced by advertisers or affiliate partnerships.

What this does and doesn't influence

These arrangements pay for the research, writing, and upkeep of this site. They do not determine what our articles say. Our editorial team writes based on publicly available terms and disclosures, not on which lender pays the largest fee. See our editorial policy for how editorial and partner work is kept separate.

What it can influence is which products we're able to link to directly, since we can only place a working link to a partner we have a relationship with. Where that's the case, we still try to describe non-partner alternatives in the article text, even without a link attached.

None of this changes the facts we report about a lender's rates, fees, or eligibility rules. Those come from the lender's own published terms, not from our arrangement with them.

Required disclosures

Our lender partners require the following disclosures to be stated plainly, and we state them here in full:

• Smart Debt Relief is not a lender.
• We do not make credit decisions.
• We cannot guarantee loan approval.
• We cannot guarantee a specific loan amount.
• There is no application fee to use our loan request form.
• Loans are not available in all states.
• Short-term loans are not a long-term financial solution.
• Loan amounts and terms vary by state and by lender.

If anything you read elsewhere on this site seems to conflict with these disclosures, the disclosures on this page govern.

What happens after you submit the form

Submitting the loan request form is not the same as applying for or accepting a loan. Your request is shared with the lender network so a participating lender can decide whether to make you an offer. You are under no obligation to accept any offer you receive, and you can walk away at any point before you sign anything with a lender directly.

Because the form is a request rather than an application to a single lender, we cannot tell you in advance which lender, if any, will respond, or what rate or term they will offer. Those questions are answered by the lender, not by us, once your request reaches them.

Why we disclose this at all

Personal loan and debt content is an area where it's easy for a reader to lose track of who is paid by whom. We would rather be plain about it up front than have a reader work it out later and wonder what else wasn't said. This is also why we separate the two questions readers tend to conflate: whether an article's facts are trustworthy, and how the site pays its bills. The two are related but not the same, and we think both deserve a straight answer.

Our full sourcing and review process is described in the editorial policy, and who we are is described on our about page. If you read only one of these three pages, it should probably be this one, since it's the page most directly about how a click or a submitted form turns into revenue for us.

Questions

If anything on this page is unclear, email us at help@smartdebtrelief.org.