Working Paper
20 to 40 pages
A full study with a method section a stranger could repeat. Reviewed by two readers before it publishes.
About the imprint
A publisher, run by a financial wellness nonprofit.
Fiona Insights exists because the research our coaches needed either sat behind a paywall or did not exist. So we started publishing it, and teaching it.
Fresh Start Financial works with households rebuilding their finances. That work runs on evidence: what a score actually responds to, what a repayment restart does to a monthly budget, where a small business cannot reach a lender. Fiona Insights is where we publish that evidence, and where we train the people who produce it.
The research here is written by the Fresh Start Financial research intern program. Interns claim a question, research it, and submit it for review; accepted work is catalogued with a permanent ident, credited by name or anonymously, as the intern chooses.
Fiona Insights is published by Fresh Start Financial, which builds tools and services for financial wellness, including the FIONA money assistant.
Volume 1 / 2026
Where the name comes from
Fiona is the Fresh Start Financial money assistant, the one that answers the everyday questions: can I afford this, what happens if I miss a payment, where is my money actually going. This imprint carries her name because it answers the same questions, at the other end of the telescope, with data instead of a chat window.
She wears the monocle here. It seemed appropriate.
What we publish
Policy Brief
8 to 16 pages
Written for practitioners. Rules, process, and decision trees rather than new estimates.
Data Note
10 to 20 pages
A described dataset, its limits, and what it can honestly support. Often the groundwork for a later paper.
Editorial standards
Five rules. They are the whole of our review policy, and every paper is held to them.
- 01
The claim matches the design
Descriptive work is reported as descriptive. We do not let a correlation get written up as a cause.
- 02
The method is repeatable from the text
A second reader has to be able to repeat the work from the description alone before it publishes.
- 03
The data is named
Every source is cited with its vintage, and the limits of each source are stated in the paper itself.
- 04
Household data stays private
Nothing from a coaching session appears in a paper in a form that could identify a client.
- 05
Entries stay available
A catalogue ident is permanent. Corrections are appended to the entry, not quietly swapped in.