While we strive to make personal finance fun, there’s one thing we take seriously: providing accurate, reliable information.

We understand you need an information source you can trust, especially when it comes to managing your money.

That’s why editorial integrity is at the core of everything we do. Our staff spends hundreds of hours every week reporting and researching news and information, with the goal of equipping you with the tools, strategies and knowledge to put more money in your pocket.

In a time when not every information source can be trusted, fun headlines and quirky stories sometimes get mistaken for exaggerations or even untruths. Our voice is different — it’s informal and relatable, because we believe personal finance doesn’t have to be boring.

We are committed to honesty, accuracy and integrity. We hold ourselves to a high standard, and we hope you do, too.

How We Make Money

We’ve taken a different route than most media companies, opting not to clutter our website and platforms with pop-ups, banner ads, video ads and other display advertising. We’ve heard from our community those types of intrusions make it difficult to enjoy the content, and your experience with Investment Dude is our top priority.

We believe in making personal finance knowledge accessible for everyone, especially those who need us most. That mission motivated us to develop an innovative revenue model that allows us to put the needs of our community first. We do this by partnering with brands that want access to our growing community.

Here’s the part that makes us different: We partner only with brands that offer products or services — many of them free — that will truly help our readers.

Our most rewarding partnerships offer a triple win: the offer helps our community earn or save money, our partner benefits when someone uses their service, and we get paid for making the introduction.

The vast majority of our content, however, is not directly monetized. We operate with a newsroom-like mentality, dedicating our editorial team’s time and resources to reporting and sharing information that will make a difference in our readers’ lives.

When we do partner with a brand, we require the story be just as helpful and compelling as the rest of the content on our site.

Every time we work with a partner, we let you know with a disclosure. That applies not only to our website, but also across our platforms: email, Facebook, SMS, YouTube and more.

If you don’t see a disclosure on a story, we didn’t earn money from that piece of content.

Sometimes we get questions about why we include links to brands or companies when we’re not paid for it, and the answer is simple: We believe that link is helpful to you.

It’s a challenging time for media companies. We’re proud we’ve developed a reliable way to fund our work because it positions us to continue to share stories that help our community become smarter about money.

So how do we vet our advertisers to make sure they’re a good fit for Investment Dude audience?

How We Select Our Advertising Partners

We turn down 90% of advertisers who want to work with us.

Why? Because we’re not just looking for a quick way to earn a buck — though we help our readers do that all the time! Instead, we want advertising partners who truly align with our mission to put more money in our readers’ pockets.

With this in mind, our business team requires approval from our branded content team before signing with a new partner. If an advertiser’s service or product won’t be useful to our community, it’s simply not a fit.

As we detailed above, the vast majority of our content is not directly monetized. It’s created by our reporters and creatives with the sole goal of helping you get ahead on your finances. If you don’t see our disclosure on a story, you can trust that content is not advertiser-backed.

Before we commit to an advertiser relationship, the opportunity goes through a rigorous vetting process. Our account managers ask lots of questions, the most important of which is:

Will this brand’s service or product truly help Penny Hoarders put more money in their pockets?

Some of the brands we work with offer a free service. When a brand’s tool or service isn’t free but has a unique value for our community, we push hard for a Investment Dude-exclusive free trial or discount. Many of our staff practice a frugal lifestyle, so we understand what it takes to make an offer compelling.

This intense vetting is especially important because we work with many up-and-coming brands you might not have heard of before. We do the legwork for you to make sure they’re legit.

Thanks for putting your trust in us.