Miguel Contreras

Miguel Contreras runs and edits NeuroCash, a set of plain-English financial guides for people who work for themselves and for people who are new to the United States. He is based in Colombia.

This page exists so you can decide how far to trust what you read here. The honest answer is that you shouldn't trust it because of who runs the site. Trust it, or don't, because of how it is checked, and check it yourself: every guide is built so that you can.

What he brings, and what he doesn't

Miguel works for himself. His income arrives irregularly, and he is paid by clients and platforms in other countries, in a currency different from the one he spends. That is the everyday reality behind several guides on this site: getting paid faster, getting paid by international clients, sending money abroad, budgeting on uneven income, choosing invoicing and accounting tools and handling taxes when income is irregular.

He is not a US taxpayer, and he has not been through the US tax system in person. He is not an accountant, a tax preparer, a financial advisor or an insurance broker, and he holds no certification in any of those fields. Everything this site says about US taxes, benefits, insurance and banking comes from the government agencies that set the rules, not from personal experience of them.

Why these guides exist

They are the guides he would have wanted to find when he had to work these things out on his own: complete enough to act on, clear about where each rule comes from, and honest about where a general guide stops and your own situation begins.

How the guides are checked

Because the site doesn't rest on anyone's credentials, it rests on its sources and on checks that anyone can repeat. These are the figures as of 28 September 2026.

• 40 guides, grouped in five areas, each with an overview page that sets out the decisions in order: taxes, retirement, insurance, banking and cash flow and newcomers.
• 87 links to official government pages inside the guides, and 182 across the whole site, drawn from 9 sources: the Internal Revenue Service, HealthCare.gov, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the FDIC, the NCUA, the Department of Labor, the Small Business Administration, USA.gov and the Federal Reserve.
• Every figure, deadline, threshold and percentage links to the page that publishes it, not to an agency's home page, so you can check it in one click.
• A page is only cited if it says what the guide says. Some useful numbers aren't published by any agency, such as how much of each payment a freelancer might set aside for taxes; when a guide uses one, the text says it's a rule of thumb. Worked examples use made-up round numbers and are labeled as examples. No blogs, forums or other websites are used as sources for facts.

Figures that expire

Some figures change every year: retirement contribution limits, Health Savings Account limits, the Social Security wage base, the dates of Marketplace open enrollment. Most guides avoid printing them and explain the rule instead. Where a yearly figure is genuinely needed to make a decision, it goes into a register: 13 figures today, each recorded with its source, the exact wording on the source page and a date by which it must be checked again. The earliest of those dates is 31 December 2026. An automated check fails if any figure passes its date, if the number on a page drifts from the register, or if a registered figure appears on a page without being tracked.

Every source, tested

Before changes are published, a second automated check opens every official page the site links to and confirms two things: that the page still loads, and that it still contains the figure or statement the guide cites. A link that loads but no longer says what the guide says is treated as a broken source. In September 2026 this check found five links on the site that loaded correctly but did not support their text; all five were corrected.

Review dates

Every guide shows, next to its byline, the date its figures were last checked against their sources, and that date changes whenever the guide changes. At the moment, 25 guides were last reviewed on 3 September 2026, 14 on 27 September 2026 and 1 on 28 September 2026.

The process, start to finish

Each guide is drafted, and then every figure and rule in it is checked against the agency page it relies on and linked to that page. Figures that will expire are entered in the register. Before anything is published, the automated checks run over the whole site, and nothing is published while any of them fails. When a reader reports an error, the source is checked again, the guide is corrected and its review date moves.

Which rules the guides describe

The guides describe United States federal rules: the tax code as the IRS applies it, federal deposit insurance, the federal Health Insurance Marketplace and federal consumer protections. States add rules of their own, particularly for income tax, car insurance and some health coverage, and they differ widely. Where a state rule changes the answer, the guide says so and tells you to check your own state.

What NeuroCash is not

NeuroCash is an educational publisher. It is not an accountant, an attorney, a tax preparer, an insurance broker or a financial advisor, and nothing on the site is personalized advice. A guide can explain how a rule works; it can't know your income, your immigration status, your state or your family, all of which can change the right answer. For decisions with lasting consequences, such as choosing a business structure, making a large retirement contribution or a tax question tied to your residency status, talk to a licensed professional. The full disclaimer sets this out in detail.

How the site is funded

NeuroCash is free to read and is supported by advertising served through Google AdSense. Advertisements are served by third parties and don't decide what the guides say or which options they discuss. The guides contain no affiliate links: the site earns nothing when you open an account, buy a policy or sign up for a product it mentions.

Corrections

If you find a figure that doesn't match its source, a link that no longer works, or anything that has gone out of date, please write to neurocash.app@gmail.com. The most useful reports include the address of the page and the exact passage. Errors are corrected, the source is checked again, and the guide's review date is updated so readers can see that it changed.

Contact

For questions about the site, suggestions for topics it should cover or privacy requests, write to the same address: neurocash.app@gmail.com.