Michael McGettrick

I'm a UK-based software engineer who has been actively investing in his own portfolio since 2021 and writing about UK personal finance since starting Freedom Isn't Free in 2026. The site exists because I spent five years figuring this stuff out the hard way, and most of what I read was either dumbed down, US-centric, or trying to sell me something. I write the resource I wish I had at the start.

Background

A decade of full-stack engineering across three UK companies (Claromentis, Three UK, and currently VoucherCodes / Ziff Davis), with over two years of hands-on line-management experience along the way. The same skill set built this site: the Nuxt frontend, the AWS infrastructure, the calculators, the search index, the cite-this-article widget. I am comfortable with spreadsheets, primary sources, and reading the small print on financial products.

How I actually invest

The most common question I get from readers is: "where is your money?" The honest answer, which I keep updated:

• Stocks and Shares ISA: iWeb for funds, Trading 212 for ETFs. Splitting across two providers keeps fund platform fees down and gives commission-free ETF dealing on the same wrapper.
• LISA: Moneybox.
• GIA: Trading 212.
• SIPP: Interactive Investor, invested in broad-market index trackers.
• Robo-advised: Nutmeg, kept as a long-running comparison against my self-directed portfolios.

I am a buy-and-hold investor with a dividend-growth and income tilt. Core positions are global market trackers; satellite positions include a mix of broad-market ETFs, REITs, BDCs and a small number of individual equities I hold for a thesis I can articulate out loud. I do not day-trade, do not hold options, do not hold leveraged ETFs, and do not hold meme coins.

What I am not

This matters, so I'd rather be explicit:

• I am not an FCA-authorised financial adviser. Nothing on this site is personalised financial advice. If your situation is complex (large inheritance, divorce-related pension split, business sale, non-domiciled tax status), you should be paying a regulated adviser, not reading a blog.
• I am not a fund manager. Freedom Isn't Free does not run portfolios on behalf of readers and never will.
• I am not a financial journalist. I have no editorial line dictated by a publisher; I also have no editor checking my work, which means I get things wrong occasionally and rely on readers and the comments section to flag it.

What I do here

On the surface, practical, evidence-based UK personal-finance content. Articles target real decisions UK retail investors face: ISA versus pension, lump sum versus drip feed, accumulation versus income ETFs, currency hedging, the 60% tax trap, the triple lock, and so on. I build calculators (FI number, mortgage, take-home pay, drawdown, stamp duty) for the same reason: so a reader can poke their own numbers and see what actually changes.

The motivation underneath is less neutral. I studied Marxism at A-level and was never convinced by it, but a Hungarian friend at university once told me: "What the communists said about communism was all a lie, but what the communists said about capitalism was all the truth." That sentence sat with me. Reading David Graeber's Debt: The First 5,000 Years, his patient anthropological account of how debt has structured oppression in human societies for thousands of years, sharpened it further. So did learning about how Chairman Mao mobilised peasants against the warlord factions in 1940s China through political education. The thread is that financial illiteracy is not just an absence of education. It is a form of social control. People who do not understand how the system extracts value from them stay quiet about being extracted from.

I am not a communist, and I do not think I ever will be. But looking at capitalism through that critical lens, without flinching from what is there, is the thing that moves people to act on their finances rather than passively accept them.

Every time someone here builds an emergency fund and uses it to walk out of a job that was grinding them down, every time someone funds a SIPP for a decade and retires early after a diagnosis they did not see coming, every time someone salary-sacrifices their way back under the £100k tax trap, the systems of exploitation that depend on people having no exit work a little less reliably. And the less reliably those systems work on us, the less likely they are to be turned on someone less fortunate. That is why we owe each other this work: the literacy, the boundaries, and the refusal to accept the world as it is dealt to us. That is what I want this site to nudge into existence, one ISA at a time.

Plain English throughout. UK numbers, UK tax wrappers, UK platforms, and primary sources (HMRC, Bank of England, ONS, FCA) wherever a claim needs backing up. Articles in the Freedom rubric (the red pill on the article header) are the more politically explicit pieces; everything else is practical guidance with the conviction tucked underneath.

Editorial principles

• No paid placements disguised as editorial. If a piece is sponsored, it says so at the top in plain English.
• Affiliate links disclosed. Some book and platform links earn the site a small fee. The recommendation comes first; if I did not already think it was worth your time, the affiliate fee would not change my mind.
• I write about products I actually use. The platform list above is kept honest.
• Mistakes get corrected. If I get something wrong, the article gets an update with a `lastUpdated` date and a note explaining what changed.

Outside this site

Three identities sit alongside Freedom Isn't Free: self-taught software developer, linguist, and retail investor.

The engineering came first, sort of by accident. I am a non-CS graduate who learned to code on the job and have been doing it professionally for ten years, currently at VoucherCodes (Ziff Davis) in London. AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner (2024).

The languages came earlier and more deliberately: BA (Hons) Spanish and International Relations, First Class, Coventry University. The actual fluency was picked up living in Madrid (Erasmus year, 2013 to 2014) and Le Havre (English language assistant, 2016 to 2017). Conversational French and Spanish, basic Mandarin. Reading-based now.

The retail investing came in 2021 and stuck, fast. It is the main intellectual hobby outside the day job, and the reason this site exists.

Get in touch

The newsletter is the best way to stay in the loop: subscribe here. For corrections, suggestions, or to flag something I've got wrong, the contact form is live.

You can also find me on LinkedIn.

Important note

The content on this site is for educational and informational purposes only. It is not financial advice. Please read the full disclaimer before making any financial decisions.