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Free the Wage Slave

Money news for people building an exit.

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About Free the Wage Slave

Four axes, six reporters, and one rule that decides everything else: if we cannot show the working, we do not publish the number.

Key takeaways

  • We cover four things: money, time, place and mind — the axes that decide whether a job is a choice or an obligation.
  • Every figure we publish is computed in code, not estimated. The same functions run the calculators, so a page and a calculator cannot disagree.
  • We do not publish a news story that only one outlet has, and we do not publish a number we cannot show the working for.

What this site is for

Most personal-finance coverage tells you what happened. This site tells you what it costs you, in dollars or in years, and shows the division. That is a narrower promise than it sounds: it rules out forecasts, it rules out survey findings we cannot check, and it rules out the round-number estimate that makes a headline work.

The reason for the narrowness is what we found when we measured the competition. The search results in this subject are held by banks, HR software companies, exchanges and tax filers — organisations with something to sell you at the end of the article. Almost none of them do the arithmetic on their own claims. Doing it is the whole differentiation.

The Freedom Compass

Four axes, and every piece sits on one of them.

Two desks sit across all four. Side Hustles covers income that is not a salary, and Crypto covers earning that is denominated in something volatile. The research desk holds the arithmetic itself.

Who writes it

Six reporters and one editor. Every piece names who filed it, when, and how many independent sources it rests on — including when that number is zero, which is the honest answer for a piece built only from our own calculations. Meet the newsroom.

How we work

Two rules do most of the work. A news story needs two independent outlets or it does not run. A number needs to be computed here, in code, or quoted from a source whose own copy we have checked it against. Both are enforced by the publishing pipeline rather than by good intentions — see our editorial policy for what that means in practice, and corrections for what happens when we get it wrong.

Not advice. Everything here is arithmetic on stated inputs. It is not financial, tax or legal advice, and no projection is a prediction. Change an input and the answer changes with it — which is the point of showing you the inputs.