plainmoney is a free, independent, plain-English daily snapshot of Australian markets, interest rates, property and money — written for everyday Australians, not traders or analysts. Each weekday morning we pull together what actually moved overnight and what it means for the cost of borrowing, the price of a home and the value of your savings, in language anyone can follow. There's no jargon to decode, no paywall, and nothing to sign up for.
It's published every weekday morning, usually around 6:45am AEST, so you can read it with your coffee before the day gets going.
Trust is the whole point of a money brief, so here is exactly how each edition is made.
The numbers come first, and they are never invented. Every figure in the brief — interest rates, share indices, currency rates, inflation, property data, crypto prices — is fetched deterministically from primary sources by code, not typed out by a person or guessed by an AI. We go to the original publishers wherever possible: the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) for the cash rate and monetary policy, the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) for inflation, jobs and other official statistics, the Australian Securities Exchange (ASX) and Yahoo Finance (via yfinance) for share and currency markets, and CoinGecko for cryptocurrency prices. Because the data is pulled by a repeatable program, the same source on the same day always produces the same number.
The words are drafted by AI over those verified numbers, then reviewed. Once the figures are locked in, the narrative — the plain-English explanation of what the numbers mean — is drafted by AI working only from that verified data, and is then reviewed before publishing. The AI explains the numbers; it does not source them, and it cannot change them.
We never predict prices, and we never give buy or sell advice. You will not find us forecasting where the dollar, the ASX or house prices are heading, and you will not find tips on what to buy or sell. We describe what has already happened and put it in context. What you do with that information is your decision.
We cite our sources and rate their reliability. Figures are sourced and dated so you can check them yourself, and we tag sources with reliability tiers — primary official sources rank highest — so you can see how much weight to give each number.
Most market coverage is either written for professionals or built to sell you something. plainmoney exists to give ordinary Australians an honest, readable starting point: the facts, the sources, the dates — and nothing dressed up as a prediction.
We welcome corrections to any figure and any feedback on the brief. You can reach us via our contact page.