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Money Owl

Editorial Standards

Last updated: 24 September 2026

Money writing lives or dies on trust, and trust built on “just take our word for it” is not trust, it’s marketing. So here is the rulebook I mark my own homework against: where the facts come from, how they get checked, what happens when I get one wrong, and who cannot buy their way into an article. Pin it to the fridge if you like.

Where the facts come from

Every figure that matters, a tax rate, a deposit-guarantee ceiling, a pension allowance, a deadline, comes from the horse’s mouth: the regulator, the tax authority, or the statistics office of the country in question, checked against the source at the time of writing. Not from a competitor’s blog post, not from a five-year-old forum thread, and not from memory, however confident memory is feeling that day.

Sources are named and linked in the article itself, where the claim is made. If a claim matters and has no source attached, that is a defect, and I would like to hear about it.

How numbers get checked

Before an article ships, its figures are checked against the named sources and its arithmetic is re-done rather than assumed. Worked examples have to actually work: if I say saving 200 euro a month for ten years at 4% lands you at a number, someone has recalculated that number, grumbling, before you ever see it.

Rules change, usually in January, occasionally out of spite. Every substantive article carries a dated last-reviewed stamp so you can see how fresh the ground under it is. When the rules move, the article gets updated and the stamp moves with it.

Corrections

I get things wrong. Anyone publishing numbers about a continent’s worth of tax systems will. The deal is this: if you spot an error, tell me through the contact form, with the where and the what. I check it against the source, and if you’re right I fix the article and update its last-reviewed date. Error reports are the most valuable post I receive, and I mean that in the literal, ledger-keeping sense.

Independence (nobody buys the rankings)

  • Nobody pays for a place. There are no paid placements: no company pays to appear in an article or a comparison table, and nobody gets quietly dropped for declining to.
  • Advertising is advertising. When ads run on the site, they are served as clearly separated ad units, and they have no say in what I write or how I rank anything.
  • No affiliate links today. If that ever changes, this page will say so, and the affected articles will disclose it inline, next to the link, not in a footnote nobody reads.

How the writing gets made

I use software tools, including AI systems, for the research, the drafting, the counting and a first round of checks: they read faster than I do and never need coffee. What ships is a different matter. I read, edit and sign off every article before it goes up, and I hold editorial responsibility for every word. The legal version of that sentence lives in the Terms of Use.

Who is accountable

I edit Money Owl, and I’m Jure Jaklič. Everything that ships carries my name somewhere, and complaints about the standards on this page land, ultimately, on my desk. It is a small desk. Your message will be noticed.