Personal finance without the sales pitch
31 guides and calculators covering budgeting, debt, saving, investing, housing and retirement. We sell no products, take no commission and run no affiliate links — so there is nothing we need you to decide.
Budgeting & Saving
Where the money actually goes, how to build a buffer that survives real life, and the habits that make saving automatic rather than heroic.
How to Budget When You Have Tried Before and Failed
Budgets do not usually fail because the arithmetic was wrong. They fail because they required daily effort that nobody sustains.…
Budgeting & SavingPractical Ways to Save Money That Actually Add Up
Advice about small daily purchases is popular because it is easy to write. The money is almost always somewhere else.…
Budgeting & SavingSinking Funds: The Fix for Budgets That Keep Breaking
Car insurance is not an emergency. It arrives on the same date every year, and treating it as a surprise is what makes budgets fail.…
Budgeting & SavingLifestyle Inflation: Why a Pay Rise Rarely Helps
Most people can name the last three pay rises they received. Far fewer can say what changed as a result.…
Budgeting & SavingInflation and What It Does to Your Money
Inflation is the reason a savings account paying 3% while prices rise 4% is quietly losing you money every year.…
Budgeting & SavingMoney and Mental Health
Financial difficulty and mental health problems each make the other worse, and the loop is well documented. Breaking it usually require…
Debt
How interest really works against you, which debts to clear first, and what to do when the payments have stopped being manageable.
Good Debt and Bad Debt: A Useful Distinction, Carefully Applied
The rate matters, what the money buys matters, and whether you could survive losing the income matters. The label 'good debt' matters l…
DebtHow Credit Scores Actually Work
There is no single credit score. There are several, calculated differently, and the one you see is rarely the one a lender uses.…
DebtWhat to Do When Debt Has Become Unmanageable
If you are paying one card with another, or choosing which bill to skip, the problem is no longer one that budgeting solves.…
Investing Basics
Risk, diversification, fees and time — the four things that determine outcomes, explained without jargon or product recommendations.
Investing for Beginners: What Actually Matters
Most of the outcome is decided by four things: how much you invest, for how long, how diversified you are, and what you pay in fees.…
Investing BasicsIndex Funds and ETFs Explained
An index fund buys the whole market rather than trying to pick the winners, which turns out to beat most of the people trying to pick t…
Investing BasicsRisk and Diversification: What They Actually Mean
Risk is not how much the price moves. It is the chance of not having the money when you need it, which is a different problem.…
Investing BasicsInvestment Fees: The Cost You Can Actually Control
You cannot control returns. You can control costs, and over thirty years the difference is often larger than any decision about what to…
Investing BasicsTax-Efficient Saving and Investing
Tax relief is a certain return. Investment performance is not. Using the available allowances is the closest thing to a guaranteed impr…
Housing & Mortgages
Renting versus buying, what a deposit really needs to be, how mortgages are priced, and the costs that never appear in the asking price.
Renting vs Buying: The Honest Comparison
Buying is not automatically better and renting is not throwing money away. The answer depends on how long you will stay, and on numbers…
Housing & MortgagesSaving a House Deposit Without Losing Your Mind
The deposit is not just a barrier to entry — its size determines the interest rate you pay for years afterwards.…
Retirement & Pensions
How much is enough, how compounding and employer contributions do the heavy lifting, and why starting early matters more than earning more.
How Pensions Work
A pension is a tax-advantaged investment account with restrictions on access. Almost everything else about it follows from those two fa…
Retirement & PensionsHow Much Do You Need to Retire?
Start from the income you want, not from a pot size. The pot is just the arithmetic that follows.…
Insurance & Protection
Which risks are worth insuring, which are not, and how to avoid paying for cover you will never be able to claim on.
Which Insurance Is Worth Buying
Insure what you cannot afford to lose. Everything else is a transfer of money to an insurer in exchange for peace of mind you may not n…
Insurance & ProtectionFinancial Emergency Planning: What to Sort Out Before You Need It
Financial resilience is mostly a small number of boring tasks, each of which takes an afternoon and none of which feels urgent until it…
Insurance & ProtectionFinancial Scams: How They Work and How to Refuse Them
You cannot recognise every scam. You can adopt a process that defeats most of them without needing to.…
Money Tools
Free calculators for budgets, debt payoff, savings goals, mortgage affordability and retirement — all running in your browser.
50/30/20 Budget Calculator
A budget framework simple enough to remember, which is the only kind anybody keeps using after the first month.…
Money ToolsEmergency Fund Calculator
An emergency fund is not an investment. Its job is to stop a surprise turning into a debt, and it is the highest-priority saving most p…
Money ToolsDebt Snowball vs Avalanche Calculator
The avalanche method always costs less. The snowball method is completed more often. This shows you the size of the trade-off in your o…
Money ToolsNet Worth Calculator
Income tells you what arrives. Net worth tells you what you have kept, which is the number that actually compounds.…
Money ToolsRetirement Savings Calculator
The two variables that matter most are how early you start and whether you are claiming the full employer match. Investment returns com…
Money ToolsMortgage Affordability Calculator
Lenders decide what you can borrow. This shows you what you can afford, which is frequently a smaller number.…
Why we have nothing to sell you
Most personal finance content is published by firms that also sell financial products. That does not make it dishonest, but it shapes what gets emphasised: the article about investing is written by a company that would like you to invest with them, and the one about insurance by a company that sells insurance.
Money Guidance sells nothing. No products, no advice service, no affiliate links, no lead generation. The site is funded by ordinary display advertising, which means we have no reason to steer you toward any particular decision.
That independence shows up in the content. We will tell you when the answer is “do nothing”, when a product is not worth buying, and when the honest answer is that it depends on circumstances we cannot see. Those are unprofitable conclusions for a firm selling something, and they are frequently the correct ones.
What we cannot do
We are a publisher, not a regulated adviser. We do not know your income, your debts, your tax position, your health or your obligations, and general information is not a substitute for advice from someone who does. For decisions with large or irreversible consequences — pension transfers, equity release, complex tax situations — use what you learn here to prepare better questions, and then put them to a regulated professional.
Your figures stay on your device
Every calculator on this site runs in your browser. Your income, your debts and your savings are never transmitted to us and never stored, because the site has no mechanism to receive them. There are no accounts and no newsletter wall. See our privacy policy.