Who pays for the money advice you read for free

The magazines

The first American magazine devoted to personal finance began in January 1947 as Kiplinger Magazine, and claims the title of first. It is now Kiplinger's Personal Finance, owned since 2021 by a British publisher, with a circulation of about 316,000 at the end of 2025.¹ Money magazine began in October 1972 and printed its last issue in June 2019.¹ The Wall Street Journal launched its "Personal Journal" section in 2002; a critic at the time charged that the paper was "adding sweetener to the formula to please advertisers".²

Magazines are paid for by readers and advertisers. The advertisers are the products.

The websites

The websites that replaced the magazines are paid for by the products alone. NerdWallet, which is publicly traded and so has to say, earned $836.6 million in 2025, "primarily through referral fees, lead generation, and partner-based monetization".³ Its customers, in its own words, are "financial services providers" seeking "leads, matches and referrals".³ The reader is not the customer. The reader is the lead. In 2024 the largest sources of revenue were insurance and credit cards.³

Bankrate was sold for $1.24 billion in 2017 to a marketing company. Investopedia belongs to a media group and earns commissions when readers buy what it reviews.⁴ Mint, the free budgeting app, said so itself: "Mint does make a small referral fee from advertisers on some offers. That's what keeps Mint free."⁵ Intuit bought it for $170 million in 2009 and shut it in 2024, moving its users to a credit-monitoring service that earns the same way.⁵

The software

The paid tools are a different case, and it is worth being exact about it. Quicken, from 1983, recorded transactions and compared a budget with actual spending. Microsoft Money did the same from 1991 to 2009. YNAB, from 2004, gives every dollar a job and charges a subscription. Monarch and Copilot Money, from 2018 and 2020, track spending, budgets, net worth and recurring charges for an annual fee.⁶ Every one of them measures the household's own cash and balances.

One product measured something else. Personal Capital, launched in 2011, offered a free fee analyzer that showed the user what their retirement plan was charging. It was bought in 2020 by Empower, a retirement-plan provider, for $825 million plus up to $175 million more.⁷ The one free tool that measured what a counterparty kept was acquired by a counterparty.

The preacher's referral fee

Dave Ramsey's company earns from the advisers it endorses. Each pays "a flat monthly membership fee and a flat monthly territory fee to advertise and receive client referrals", reported in 2017 at $400 to $900 a month per adviser, for about a thousand advisers.⁸ The listener hears a recommendation. The adviser pays for the territory.

The arithmetic of free

If an article about credit cards is free, and the site that published it earned $176 million from credit-card referrals in a year, then the article is part of a sales channel and the card issuers are the customer.³ That does not make the article wrong. It makes it a document written by the seller's side, which is the side that has always written the household's money advice, from the bank pamphlet of 1920 onward.

The test to apply is the same at every stage of the field's history: who paid for this, and does it ever tell you what the seller keeps? On the free sites, the answer to the first question is in the annual report, and the answer to the second is no.