How the Money Score works

What the Money Score actually is

A single 0–100 number plus six category sub-scores (Earn, Save, Protect, Borrow Smart, Grow, Plan) built from your answers to a 10-question quiz. The score isn't a credit score, isn't reported to credit bureaus, and doesn't affect anything outside our site. It's a private signal of where you are financially and what would help most right now.

The score updates in real time as you complete checklist items. The dashboard shows you what changed since your last visit.

How we calculate it

For each of the six categories we look at the items applicable to your situation (e.g. renters don't see homeowner-only items, subprime users see credit-builder items, etc.), then compute a percentage of those items completed weighted by their financial impact. The headline score is a weighted average of the six categories, with weights adjusted based on your stated goal and your persona profile.

Critical design constraint: we only count items that apply to you. A renter doesn't lose points for not having homeowners insurance. Someone with no dependents isn't penalized for not having life insurance. Otherwise the score would be unfair across personas, and the engagement loop would break for half our users.

What data we use

• Your quiz answers. Zip code, age band, income band, employment, housing, credit band, debt amount + types, savings amount. You can answer "prefer not to say" on most of these.
• Your interactions with Walley. If you share something in conversation (e.g. "we have two kids" or "my mortgage is at 6.25%"), Walley extracts the structured fact and keeps it so we don't ask you the same question twice. You can review + delete any of these at /settings/walley-notes.
• Your checklist completions. When you mark an item done — or when we detect completion via partner postback — your score updates.
• What we DON'T collect: we don't pull your credit report, scan your transactions, or have read access to your bank accounts. The score is entirely based on what you tell us.

How Walley works (and what it isn't)

Walley is an AI coach built on Claude (by Anthropic). It reads your Money Score profile, recent conversation history, and curated WalletGrower content to give you personalized recommendations. Walley sends most of your weekly check-in emails and handles inbound replies as real conversations.

Walley is NOT a registered financial advisor, CPA, or attorney. For complex tax strategy, specific investment advice, divorce or inheritance issues, or anything that requires licensed expertise, Walley will tell you to talk to a professional. We've trained Walley to say "people in your situation typically do X" rather than "you should do X" on regulated topics.

Your conversations are stored for 90 days in full text and summarized into a single paragraph after that so Walley can remember you long-term without keeping every message forever. The team reviews flagged conversations to improve Walley's tone + accuracy. You can download all of this or delete your account at any time via the links in your settings page.

How we make money — and how that affects what Walley says

WalletGrower earns commissions when you sign up for products through our partner links (banking accounts, credit cards, loans, insurance, etc.). Walley's recommendations can include these products. We are explicit about this in every partner-link disclosure, and you'll see the recommendation framed as "Based on what you told me, X is the strongest fit."

We've also intentionally built Walley to recommend the unmonetized option when it's right. For credit reports: "Just pull yours at annualcreditreport.gov — it's free and takes 90 seconds." For will creation: "Don't pay a lawyer for the basic stuff — Trust & Will is fine for most people." Trust is our conversion multiplier, so giving you the right answer regardless of revenue is the only model that compounds.

We monitor Walley's conversation logs internally for instances where Walley recommended a monetized option that wasn't best-fit, and we revise scripts when we find them. We're not perfect, but we're trying to be honest.

How we keep rates and product details current

The biggest failure mode of AI-generated finance content is citing rates and product details that are out of date or just wrong. We attack this two ways. First, a daily audit re-verifies every named rate against the vendor's published disclosure — the audit runs against 100+ pages and patches stale numbers as it finds them. Second, Walley never quotes a rate from its training data; it reads from a verified-rates database that's synced from the daily audit. When you see a number in Walley's response, it's been cross-checked within the last 24 hours.

That said: rates change between cycles. The disclaimer in every Walley email and partner link points this out. Always confirm specifics on the provider's own site before applying.

Your controls

• See everything we have about you. Hit "Download my data" on the Walley notes page for a full JSON export.
• Delete your account. Email hello@walletgrower.com from your account email. We respond within 45 days per state privacy law.
• Change how we reach you. Unsubscribe from email at the bottom of any email. To opt out of texts (if you signed up for them), reply STOP to any Walley text. Update preferences in your settings.
• Skip questions. You can answer "prefer not to say" or skip optional quiz questions. We use safe defaults for any field you skip; your score will be less precise but you don't have to give us anything you're uncomfortable sharing.