Data Collection
What readers actually do with money
Cheddar Den explains money, work and the history behind both. Underneath every article, readers can answer small anonymous questions and guess old prices — and the totals become research we publish right here. So you can see what real people actually do with money, not just what pundits say they should.
Two layers, one site
Every article here does two jobs.
Plain talk about money
Personal finance guides, career deep dives and money history — written to inform, to give you context, and occasionally to make you wince at what a 1975 house cost.
A real-world read on money habits
Layered on top, readers can tap a quick answer, react to an image or guess a price. Counted anonymously across thousands of people, those signals show how people really budget, spend and remember prices — data most surveys never make public.
What we measure
Only the signals readers choose to give, plus ordinary page analytics.
Guess the price
On then-versus-now price lists, pick what a car, a toy or a loaf of bread cost before the number is revealed. It measures how far memory of old prices drifts from reality.
Money-habit polls
Saver or spender, cash or credit, branch or app, what you would do with an unexpected $1,000 — asked in habits and ranges, never in dollars you have.
Lived it · Remember it
On nostalgia pieces, one tap says whether you lived it, remember it, or it was before your time.
Reactions & the “why?”
A heart or thumbs-down on an image, with an optional one-tap reason — “simpler times”, “looks like good value”, “wasn’t actually better then”.
Saves
Saving an image or article to your own list. We count that a save happened; the list lives in your browser.
Reading activity
Which images were viewed, scroll depth and time on page — the basics that tell us which stories are useful.
What’s stored with each signal
What we keep
A random session ID that isn’t linked to your name, email or any account · your device type · how you arrived (Pinterest, Facebook, a search engine and so on) · an approximate region at the state or province level, worked out at the network edge. Your IP address is not stored with this data. When a visit comes from one of our ads, we may attach the ad platform’s aggregate audience breakdown for that ad — the age-range and gender mix of everyone the ad reached — never anything about you personally.
What these features never collect
What we never take
- Your name, email address or any account details
- Your IP address or precise location
- Anything you type
- Who you are — there is no profile of you, only anonymous totals
- Your income, salary, debts, account balances or any financial account details
Most money writing tells you what people should do. We wanted to know what people actually do — and share it.
How results get published
Totals, never people.
We only publish totals and percentages across many readers, and small groups are never reported. After you answer, the page shows live results once enough readers have weighed in; the bigger findings become articles — how readers really budget, which old prices they misremember most, and whether “getting by was easier back then” holds up.
Images are described by their attributes — the era an image reads as, the setting and the kind of goods or workplace shown — so reactions can be grouped into findings. We don’t use facial recognition, and people in photos are never identified.
Your choices
Take part, or don’t. Your call.
Every one of these features is optional: if you’d rather not take part, simply don’t tap. Saved images and articles live in your own browser, so clearing your browser storage removes them. Newsletter sign-ups and our advertising and analytics partners are covered separately in our Privacy Policy.