Editorial Standards
Last updated: 8 July 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 we mark our own homework against: where the facts come from, how they get checked, what happens when we 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 we 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 we 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
We 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 us through the contact form, with the where and the what. We check it against the source, and if you’re right we fix the article and update its last-reviewed date. Error reports are the most valuable post we receive, and we mean that in the literal, ledger-keeping sense.
Independence (nobody buys the rankings)
- No paid placements in rankings or roundups. The order is the order. Nobody moves up a comparison table by paying us, 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 we write or how we 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
We use software tools, including AI systems, for research and drafting: they read faster than we do and never need coffee. What ships is a different matter. Every article is reviewed, edited, and signed off by a human editor before publication, and the editor named on the About page holds editorial responsibility for every word. The legal version of that sentence lives in the Terms of Use.
Who is accountable
Money Owl is edited by Jure Jaklič. Everything that ships carries his name on it somewhere, and complaints about the standards on this page land, ultimately, on his desk. It is a small desk. Your message will be noticed.