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Money Owl

About Money Owl

We’re a personal-finance site for people in Europe who sit somewhere between “just got paid” and “not entirely sure what a pension actually is.” The brief, which we take as seriously as a tax tribunal, is this: a clever, slightly grumpy European friend who reads the tax code so you don’t have to. We’ve read the tax code. It didn’t improve us. We read it anyway.

Why this exists

Most money writing in Europe falls into one of four sad little boxes:

  1. Boomer-coded newspaper columns about paying off your mortgage before retirement.
  2. US imports that don’t translate (401(k), Main Street, “dollar-cost averaging” with actual dollars).
  3. Neobank marketing that calls you a “changemaker” and promises “a new relationship with money”.
  4. Paywalled.

We wanted something else. Honest, specific, plain-spoken, and written as though the rules change every year, on the grounds that the rules do in fact change every year. This is for the 22-to-42-ish European who googled “what’s a UCITS” at 11pm because they half-wanted to open a Trade Republic account and half-suspected the whole arrangement was a scam. Both halves are reasonable. We are here to settle the argument.

Who we are

Money Owl was founded and is edited by Jure Jaklič. Jure writes, edits, and pushes back on drafts; everything that ships carries his name on it somewhere, in the manner of a person who’s signed for a parcel and now owns whatever was inside. His background is business, with 15+ years in data analytics and a stint at a Big Four firm, which is a long-winded way of saying he reads numbers and rules for a living and isn’t easily impressed by either. The owl mascot, small, outlined, and awake at all hours, has been around longer than the website.

Editorial integrity

  • No paid placements in the review roundups. The order is the order. Nobody buys their way up it, and we will state this with the flat certainty of a man reading out a bus timetable.
  • Corrections welcome. If we got a number wrong, the contact form is the proper place to tell us off. We log it, we fix it, and we update the article’s last-reviewed date, so the record stands as a small monument to our having been wrong on a Tuesday.
  • The rulebook is public. Our sourcing, fact-checking, and correction rules live on the Editorial Standards page, so you can mark our homework against the rules we set ourselves.
  • How the lights stay on. Money Owl is free and paywall-free. Once Google AdSense approves the site it will carry display ads, and that is what pays the bills. Ads get marked as ads and kept clear of the writing. None are passed off as our own recommendations, and no advertiser gets a say in what we write.

The site’s Terms of Use set out the legal side of the editorial disclaimer. The short version, stripped of ceremony: this is general information, not personalised advice.

Where we cover

Money Owl is pan-European. Each country runs its own tax rules, its own pension wrappers, its own bank names, and its own particular flavour of bureaucracy, so we name the correct one for where you actually are, rather than pretending a single generic answer exists for a continent that can’t agree on the price of a coffee. If your market isn’t covered yet, tell us via the contact form. That is, precisely and unromantically, how the country list grows.

What you can do

  • Read. Explainers, step-by-step guides, and quick tips across our five topic areas: Money Management, Investing & Wealth, Career & Business, Life & Property, and Money Mindset.
  • Use the Tools. Calculators for compound interest, emergency funds, and a handful of other things. No sign-up, no email capture, no quiet harvesting of your details for a purpose to be named later.
  • Suggest a topic. The contact form is how every idea gets in. We read all of them, including the ones that begin with the words “this is probably stupid, but”. They are rarely stupid.
  • Flag errors. Same form. We treat corrections with the seriousness other sites reserve for product launches.

If you want to know how we handle your data, the Privacy Policy holds the full picture, set out in the dull and complete fashion a privacy policy ought to be.