It’s Christmas at Financial Expert and we are celebrating reaching the halfway point of our tree-planting goals which we set at the start of the year. 

As a quick reminder, back in December 2020 we originally set out to fund the planting of 10,000 trees by December 2022. This month marks the mid-point between the starting date and our tough deadline.

Tree planting update

We are pleased to report that we have hit 5,000 trees! This can be publicly verified by visiting the Ecologi website and looking at our public profile. The image above is taken from this profile. 

The round number isn’t a coincidence – we stretched the most reached single-purchase of trees to ensure that we precisely reached 5,000 by the end of the year. 

Financial Expert has been climate positive (i.e. a paying member of Ecologi) for 13 months now. 

During this time, contributions on our behalf to carbon offsetting programmes have resulted in 19.72 tonnes of carbon being removed from the atmosphere. 

The tree count has also now reached 5,000 – exactly halfway towards our goal of 10,000. The ambition feels very realistic now that we have demonstrated sufficient progress in the first half of the challenge period. 

In December we spent £60 in addition to the Ecologi recurring subscription to purchase 547 trees (see below) which has helped make this happen. These trees will be planted in Mbale, Uganda and are the 29,500,000th trees Ecologi’s members have funded so far. 

In our Ecologi review, we have made clear that the visibility and transparency of the tree purchases (and carbon certificates) on the Ecologi website is first class, which is why we continue to use Ecologi as our environmental partner on this project. 

Ecologi subscription level

In previous updates, Financial-Expert.co.uk was on the ‘Booster’ subscription, which through a direct debit results in the carbon footprint of two people being offset. We sought to increase the subscription level, and I am pleased to announce that Financial-Expert.co.uk is now a ‘Mega’ member, which equates to 4 footprints. 

In addition, we are continuing to make one-off contributions which are typically worth an additional 1-2 ‘Mega’ subscriptions each month. 

Considering that the carbon footprint of our business is very low, this is having an outsized effect and we love that we’re doing much more than ‘necessary’ to ensure that the website is climate-positive. 

Our claim to being the greenest savings & investment website in the UK 

If you’ve recently visited our homepage, you may have read our new public claim to be the ‘UK’s greenest website for savings & investments. 

This is a difficult claim (for any website to make) because of a lack of centrally-collected data regarding carbon emissions and offsets for small businesses. 

We have made our claim in good faith, on the basis of a study of the climate policies of various competitors and we have been as transparent as possible about our claim. If any other website can demonstrate that they are doing even better than Financial Expert then we will immediately revisit the claim.

We make the claim on the following grounds: 

• We offset over 2,000% of our estimated carbon footprint
• We plant a tree for approximately every 40 visitors to the website

From our research to date, we haven’t found any similar businesses with metrics which come anywhere these stats so our claim will possibly remain proudly on the site for a long time to come!

See our climate page for more information.