How My Horizon Makes Money

When we launched My Horizon, we had two goals.

The first was to give everyone the ability to build a real financial plan without breaking the bank. The second was to guide people toward financial products that help them rather than hurt them.

The second goal turns out to be the harder one.

The problem with how financial products get sold

Not every bank, IRA, or estate planning tool is built the same. Some are genuinely good. Some are quietly terrible — a savings account paying a fraction of what the one next to it pays, a product with fees that only make sense to the person selling it.

But that's rarely what determines which one you hear about. In practice, the products you see advertised are the ones with the largest marketing budgets, not the ones with the best terms for you. The industry rewards spending, not quality. That's the gap we're trying to close.

How we actually make money

My Horizon is free to use. We earn money in two ways.

When you open a product through us. If we show you a savings account or similar product and you sign up, we may be paid by that institution — sometimes for the click, sometimes only if you open and fund the account.

When you choose to work with a partner advisor. If you decide you want human help and we introduce you to an advisor, that advisor or their firm pays us for the introduction. They're independent professionals — we're not an investment adviser, and we don't give investment advice. Whether you work with them is entirely your call.

That's the whole model. There's no subscription, and we don't sell your data.

We also want to be straightforward about something our advertising disclosure spells out in full: these relationships can influence which products we show you and how prominently we show them. Any site that tells you compensation plays no role at all is asking you to believe something unlikely.

The line we hold

What compensation never touches is the math.

Your projection, your retirement age, the effect of saving more or retiring later — none of that changes based on who pays us. The analysis is the analysis. If the honest read on your plan is uncomfortable, we'd rather show you that than a friendlier number.

And when we decide which partners to feature at all, the filter is simple: our partners are the ones we'd recommend to our friends and our families, and that we use ourselves. If a product doesn't clear that bar, no payout makes it worth featuring.

This means we don't always make the most money available from a given recommendation. Sometimes we make nothing at all. We've decided that's an acceptable trade. Focusing on long-term outcomes rather than short-term revenue is the only version of this business that we think is worth building — and if enough companies operate that way, it changes how financial services get used, and abused, in this country.

Know a company we should work with?

If you know a business that genuinely has consumers' best interests at heart, we'd like to hear about it. Email us at support@myhorizonfinance.com.

And if anything here raises a question about a specific product or relationship, ask us that too. A model you can't ask questions about isn't really transparent.