I’m Dan, and I’ve worked in various roles in Banking and Finance within the City of London for the last fifteen years in a diverse range of roles – I’ve developed banking products (and so understand how they work from a value perspective), helped optimise how banks run their operations as well as acting as a risk and compliance expert.
Most of all though I’m passionate about personal finance. A natural love of things running efficiently, coupled with the mindset of an economist mean I’m passionate in my personal life about getting the best value for money. This doesn’t always mean the cheapest option is best – it’s about making sure you’re getting the right trade off between price and a quality product.
I first discovered the world of investments in an unusual way – I was bored on the internet and entered a virtual stock picking competition. That started off an interest in understanding investments, exactly what companies do and how to make the best use of your hard earned money and led to me starting my career in Financial Services, and I hold the CISI Investment Advice Diploma as a professional qualification. I’ve also managed my personal investment portfolio for over 15 years and been pleased to see it consistently grow, applying a get rich slowly but effectively mentality.
When not found writing out about how you can use your money effectively I enjoy good food, a good book, travelling into the real wilderness (inspiring a few travel articles on here from the good things I’ve found to help that) and going and discovering weird and wonderful events around London.
I also have a bit of a love affair with gadgets and trying them out, especially in the kitchen! A number of the articles are on here are based on my experiences of getting something new and trying it out, then giving you my honest opinion of if they’re worth it or not! We know trust is the most important thing, so we take this seriously – everything on the site is written by myself rather than an AI with us talking through the bad bits as well as the good when we’re doing reviews.
My wife and I also now have a baby son – so I’ll also be writing more on my experience and advice with navigating the challenges of parenting and finances, as what’s best to do for your child here is often confusing.
Why you can trust The Financial Wilderness
We take an approach of complete transparency here, as we know your trust is important. If we write about a product it’s because we’ve used it, and we’re sharing our real life examples of how we’ve found it in real life day to day situations. Nearly everything we review bought with our own money but if we’re offered something for free we’ll clearly highlight that to you.
Much of the internet can be either overwhelmingly positive or negative – we really focused on being balanced and making sure if negatives are there they are called out as much as the positive – we always aim to be fair.
Sometimes we will receive commission if you buy something from a link on the site, which is a practical reality of running a viable website. We make it a point to treat all reviews exactly the same regardless of if we get paid or not, and not influence our opinion.
Irrespective, we will also clearly highlight in articles where we will earn commission via links on the page, so you know we have an interest.
Sometimes, we will partner with companies looking to highlight their products via a sponsored post. We carefully vet these and do not simply accept anyone paying – if they appear on the site, we think their products offer value. We’ll always highlight regardless where a post has been sponsored.
Who is The Financial Wilderness aimed at
We welcome absolutely anyone interested in learning about Personal Finance or Consumer Affairs!
We are based in the UK and as such our content is written from that perspective, but many aspects of investing and consumer finance are global and not country specific.
Whilst our main audience is UK led, we get a healthy amount of worldwide visitors and much of our advice applies worldwide.
The Financial Wilderness in the Media
The Financial Wilderness has been featured giving expert commentary in number of publications including Reader’s Digest, AOL, GoBankingRates, AOL, The Daily Telegraph, The Mirror and TravelPulse.
We’re always happy to help out journalists and media partners with expert comment – please get in touch with us at the Contact Us form if we can help.
Subscribe to The Financial Wilderness
If you want to boost your finances and would like to get my thoughts and tips on effective money management regularly, the best thing to do is to subscribe to the Wilderness by putting in your e-mail below to be informed about all our great content.
Financial Wilderness Social Media and Topic Suggestions
You can also like our wonderful Facebook and Twitter pages here, which give you more chance to interact with us.
I go into a little more detail about why I started The Financial Wilderness at the first blog post here.
And if you’ve got a topic you’d like me to cover, a question to answer or you’d like to work with the Wilderness, you can get in touch directly at our Contact Us page here.
