About & method
The straight answer
I'm Jacob Stretton — a registered nurse and final-year medical student in regional NSW, and the one person behind plainmoney. I built it because the money coverage my mates were reading was written either for professionals or by someone trying to sell them something. There's no paywall here, no ads, and nothing for sale.
Why this site exists
The people around me were making the biggest money decisions of their lives — a first home, a mortgage, super, tax — off headlines and hot takes. Meanwhile the real answers were sitting in RBA tables and ABS releases: free, public, and unreadable unless you already spoke the language. plainmoney is the translation. The facts, the sources, the dates, in plain English — and nothing dressed up as a prediction.
I'm not a broker, not an adviser, not a marketer. I make these decisions with my own money, which is why every page here is one I actually wanted to read first.
The three things I won’t budge on
Keep it simple. If you need a finance degree to follow it, I've stuffed it up. Plain words, real numbers, one column.
Be informed. Every figure is sourced and dated so you can check it yourself. When the data's rubbish or nobody knows, I say so out loud. And I never predict prices — anyone who does is selling something.
Make decisions. Every page ends with the call — what I'd actually do. Fence-sitting helps nobody. It's general information, not personal advice, but it's pointed.
How each brief is built
- Numbers fetched code pulls every figure from primary sources
- AI drafts plain English over the locked numbers
- Human review a human checks before publishing
- Published 6:45am site and inbox, every weekday
Every figure — interest rates, share indices, currency, inflation, property data, crypto prices — is fetched by code from primary sources: the Reserve Bank of Australia for the cash rate, the Australian Bureau of Statistics for inflation and jobs, the ASX and Yahoo Finance for share and currency markets, and CoinGecko for crypto. Nothing is typed by hand and nothing is guessed by an AI. Same source, same day, same number — every time.
Once the figures are locked, AI drafts the plain-English explanation over them, and a human reviews it before it goes out. The AI explains the numbers; it can't source them and it can't change them. Sources are cited, dated and tagged by reliability — primary official sources rank highest — so you can see how much weight each number deserves.
You'll never find a price forecast or a buy/sell tip here. The brief tells you what happened and what it means. What you do with that is yours.
Keeping me honest
- No ads, no affiliate links, no sponsors on this site today — if that ever changes, it'll be labelled and logged first on how plainmoney makes money.
- Corrections live openly on the corrections log.
- Spot an error? Tell me — I read everything and fix figures fast.
Your call
Read the brief with your coffee — it's out every weekday around 6:45am AEST — and check any number that matters to you against its source. If I've got one wrong, email me and I'll fix it in the open. That loop is the whole product.