About Bills & Brains

What this is

164 articles on investing, borrowing, insurance, goals and retirement, written for people who are not already financially literate. It is free, it sells nothing, and it takes no money from anybody whose products it writes about.

The premise is narrow. Personal finance is full of claims that sound reasonable and have never been tested — that a monthly investment removes market risk, that buying after a fall beats investing steadily, that a government bond fund is safe. Where a claim like that can be settled with evidence, we run the test on real market history and publish the working. Where it cannot, the article says so and stops, rather than filling the gap with a number that sounds right.

That second half is the unusual part, and it is deliberate. A good number of the articles here reach no conclusion, because the data to reach one does not exist. One of them abandons the conclusion its own test invited, after a second test contradicted it.

Who writes it

Bills & Brains is published under its own name rather than a person's. The articles carry no byline, and nothing here claims a qualification, a licence or a professional standing that would need to be verified.

That is a real limitation and it is worth saying plainly: you cannot look up the author and judge them, which on a money site is a reasonable thing to want to do. What you can do instead is check the work. Every figure on the site is computed at build time from a named dataset, every article carries a record of which computation produced which number, and the editorial standards describe the mechanism in detail. An argument you can check beats a credential you have to take on trust — not in every respect, but in the one that matters most here.

How it is paid for

By advertising, and by nothing else. There is no sponsored content, there are no paid articles, there are no affiliate links to products, and nobody can buy a mention or a conclusion. If that ever changes, it will be disclosed on this page before it happens rather than after.

Adverts are served by a third party and are chosen by that third party, not by us. An advert next to an article is not an endorsement, and no advertiser sees an article before it is published or has any way to influence what it says.

What this site will not do

It will not tell you what to buy. Bills & Brains is not registered with SEBI as an investment adviser or a research analyst, gives no personalised advice, and has no way of knowing your circumstances — the disclaimer sets this out in full. A question about your own money belongs with a registered adviser who can see your whole position.

It will also not invent a figure. Where a number would be needed and no trustworthy source for it exists, the article does without it and explains what is missing. That rule is the reason some pages here are shorter and less satisfying than the equivalent elsewhere, and it is not negotiable.

Corrections

If something here is wrong, we want to know, and a reported error gets checked rather than filed. Write to us — the page it is on and the number you expected are the two most useful things to include. How corrections are handled is set out in the editorial standards.