Free the Wage Slave
Money news for people building an exit.
Marguerite Deane
If we cannot show the working, we do not publish the number.
About Marguerite Deane
Marguerite grew up outside Scranton, the daughter of a school administrator and a machinist, and paid for a journalism degree at Temple by working the 5am shift in a hospital kitchen. She has said more than once that the six months she spent doing payroll for a home-care agency taught her more about money reporting than the degree did — she saw what a rota change did to a family's month, in a spreadsheet, every fortnight.
She spent eleven years on regional business desks before moving into personal finance full time, most of it covering the gap between what employers announce and what employees actually experience. She started this newsroom because that gap is almost never priced. A return-to-office mandate gets covered as a culture story; nobody divides the commute into the salary.
Her rule for the desk is narrow and unpopular: a number goes in a piece only if it is computed here in code, or quoted from a source whose own copy we have checked it against. She wrote the pipeline check that rejects a draft carrying any other figure, and she is the one who has to sign off when a writer wants an exception. She has not granted one.
She coaches a girls' under-13 field hockey side on Saturdays and is unreasonably serious about it. She has never owned a car, which she admits makes her the wrong person to argue with about commuting costs, and is the reason the commute calculator has a zero-minute row.
Areas of expertise
- Editorial standards and corrections
- Return-to-office mandates
- The four-day week
- Effective hourly rate
- Methodology and disclosure
- Newsroom automation
How Marguerite works
She edits for the sentence a reader can act on. Every piece has to answer what the story costs or pays the reader, in dollars or in hours, and say plainly when the answer is nothing — a piece that cannot say what changed for you does not run.
On sourcing she is stricter than the industry: two independent outlets for an event, or it waits. She would rather be second and right, and has killed pieces at the last edit for resting on a single outlet's framing.
The record
years covering this beat
pieces filed on this site
words published here
pieces built on a computed table
Counted from what is published on this site, not from anywhere else. There are no follower or subscriber figures on this page: they are not public, and an audience number is not a competence signal.
Credentials
- BA Journalism, Temple University
- Eleven years on regional business desks before founding this masthead
- Wrote and maintains this site's editorial policy and corrections process
Recent work
What your commute is really paid
Cash in lieu of benefits: How much is your employer offering?
Every FIRE target at three withdrawal rates
- What a four-day week is worth, per hour
- The withdrawal-rate table nobody publishes
- A 3% raise and a 3% spending cut buy the same year — but only one lowers the target
Standards and contact
Every piece under this byline follows the same rules as the rest of the site: two independent outlets for a news claim, computed arithmetic for every figure, and assumptions printed beside any projection. See the editorial policy and corrections. There is no public inbox yet; when there is, it is listed here and on the policy page.
About this byline. Free the Wage Slave publishes under a small standing roster rather than anonymously, so a reader can see who is accountable for a desk and what that desk will and will not claim. These are editorial personas, stated as such here and on the newsroom page — the accountability that matters is the method, which is published in full and checkable line by line.