About Money Owl
Most money advice in English is written for someone in Ohio. It reaches for a 401(k) by the second paragraph and treats the IRS as a law of nature. Read it in Lisbon or Ljubljana and you’re left translating, and much of it doesn’t survive the trip.
Money Owl is personal finance for people who live in Europe. Figures come in euros by default, and when a rule depends on the country, I say which country’s rule it is. Every article is free to read.
Who’s behind it?
I’m Jure Jaklič. I started Money Owl and I still edit it. Much of what it covers, I met first as my own paperwork.
I’ve lived and worked in six European countries, Slovenia and Spain among them. For one stretch I was a cross-border worker, living in one country and working in another. I’ve filed my own tax returns under more than one system, without an adviser, and I have pensions on both sides of a border. When Slovenia swapped its own currency for the euro, I was living there. Years later, a referendum in another country rearranged my banking.
By trade I’m a data analyst, with more than 15 years of it. Some were spent inside a large European bank, around retail products and their fees, and some at a Big Four firm, building data platforms and checking the numbers behind deals. I’ve invested my own money for more than a decade, and I read regulators in four languages. These days I work for myself, in Spain, which is where Money Owl is run from. The operator details are on the Legal Notice.
None of that makes me a financial adviser, and I’m not one. It does mean the cross-border questions on this site are ones I’ve had to answer for myself first.
Newer articles say “I”, and that’s me. Older ones still say “we” until I next revise them, and that “we” was always me plus the software described below. The owl is the mascot. It turns up in the drawings and keeps its opinions to itself, which puts it ahead of most of the finance internet.
How do I know any of this?
Where a question can be settled by counting, the counting gets done and the method is shown. One piece tested every waiting window in eighteen years of European tracker-fund history, for instance. Where counting isn’t possible, I go to whoever sets the rule, usually the regulator or the tax office in that country, and name the source in the article.
How are the articles made?
AI tools do much of the work: the research, the drafting, the counting and a first round of checks. I choose what gets written, and I read, edit and sign off every piece before it goes up. Every figure is checked against the source it cites. The detail is on the Editorial Standards page.
I’ll get things wrong. There are a lot of countries. If you spot a mistake, tell me through the contact form, with the article and the line. When you’re right, it gets fixed, and the article’s last-reviewed date moves.
Who pays for it?
For now, I do. Nothing here is sponsored, and there are no ads or affiliate links.
Which countries does it cover?
Anywhere in Europe. Tax and pensions still stop at each border, so when a rule depends on the country, I name the country and its rule. One answer won’t fit a continent that can’t agree on the price of a coffee.
Articles are in English for now. If your country’s rules are missing from something you’ve read, tell me. That’s the entire procedure by which the country list grows.
Where should I start?
The articles sit in three sections for now: Money Management, Investing & Wealth, and Money Mindset. Alongside them are the tools, calculators for the sums nobody enjoys doing by hand, from sizing an emergency fund to what an ETF’s fees cost you over the years you hold it. None of them asks for your email address.
Questions and corrections come in through the contact form, and so do topic ideas. I read every one, including the ones that start “this is probably a stupid question”. It rarely is.
Money Owl isn’t a financial adviser and isn’t authorised by any financial regulator, so everything here is general information, not personal advice. The legal version is in the Terms of Use. How your data is handled is in the Privacy Policy.