Options First is a personal-finance publication.
A reading room for Canadians researching personal loans. Independently operated. Cited and reviewed. No paywall, no email gate, no advertising.
A publication first.
Options First publishes long-form personal-finance guides for Canadian readers. The guides are written by editors, reviewed annually, and updated when material changes occur. Every claim that could be fact-checked has a source attached.
The home page does not lead with a sales pitch because the site is not, in the primary sense, a sales funnel. It is a reference resource. Most readers will arrive, read a guide, use the calculator, and leave. That is what the site is designed for.
A small minority of readers, after research, will choose to begin a loan inquiry through us. For that subset, we provide a low-prominence application form and a referral relationship with established Canadian lenders.
Three standards.
§ I. Citation discipline.
Every claim in our guides that could be fact-checked has a source attached. Sources include Canadian regulatory bodies (Bank of Canada, Financial Consumer Agency of Canada), the credit bureaus (Equifax, TransUnion), and reputable consumer-finance research.
§ II. Annual review.
Every guide is reviewed at least once per year. When the rate environment, regulations, or lender landscape change in ways that materially affect the content, we update the guide and the last-reviewed date.
§ III. No paywall, no email gate, no ads.
Guides and the calculator are free to read without registration. We do not sell advertising. We do not run affiliate marketing on the guides themselves.
The disclosure.
When a reader chooses to begin a loan inquiry through us, our partner lenders pay us a referral fee. The fee is the same regardless of which lender you choose, so we have no reason to push one over another. The fee does not change your rate or terms.
We do not make money from advertising. We do not sell your data. We do not run affiliate marketing within the guides themselves. The only way we earn from this site is the referral fee for inquiries that close.
Anti-positioning.
- We are not a lender.
- We are not a credit-monitoring service.
- We are not a debt-counselling service (though we cite reputable ones in our guides).
- We are not a marketplace in the comparison-shopping sense.
- We do not sell investment products or insurance.
If you’ve finished reading and want to begin a loan inquiry, our team can help →