Martin Lewis Charity Fund 2025 Update: What happened to my £10m pledge? (Spoiler – it's now £20m+)

When MSE joined the MONY Group (was MoneySupermarket Group) in June 2012, I pledged £10m to go to charity. It was a public pledge, so I feel a duty of transparency about it, and so every year I bash out a blog to update where I'm up to, and who's got what money. This is the update for the start of 2025.

In my view, transparency is important both ways round. It's not just about who I've given to, charities – most especially those involved in policy work – should be overt about who the bigger donors are, so people can decide for themselves if there is an agenda or any vested interests. Sadly, not all do. I hope to be clear about what I'm linked to here. Plus the blog is also a good opportunity to talk about some charities you may know less about (or may not know are charities).

In this blog

• The big picture: the £10m is now well over £20m…

• Where the money has gone so far... the big projects

• A friendly but important note to charity fundraisers...

• The (attempt at) logic behind these donations

The big picture: the £10m is now well over £20m…

I'm a geek, so I always like to start with some numbers...

• £11m is the total I've personally put into charity funds, including Gift Aid (or equivalent).

• £2m of this was direct funding to Citizens Advice.

• £9m was put into a Charities Aid Foundation (CAF) fund. This works like a charity bank account – I control it, but can only use it to make charitable-type donations (anyone can do this for £10+/mth donations).

• £10m from that CAF fund has been donated to specific charities (detailed below).

• So that's total donations of £12.5m. Substantially more than the original £10m pledge.

• The good news – there's still almost £8.75m left in the CAF fund. If you think all this doesn't add up, delightfully you're right. Primarily because the investments I put a chunk of the charity money in did well.

• There's another £5m of donations on top of all that too, which I'll detail below, either as they weren't in the £10m original pledge (or the £11.4m above), were before the charity fund pledge, or were only indirectly funded by me.

Where the money has gone so far... the big projects

1. The Money and Mental Health Policy Institute: £4,725,000. I set up the Money and Mental Health Policy Institute (MMHPI) charity in 2016 and still provide its core annual funding (£425,000 in 2025). It has been far more successful than I could have ever envisaged, mostly due to the dedication and hard work of its now 18 brilliant full-time staff members.

It's not a consumer help charity, the money wouldn't have stretched far for that. Instead its role is to break the toxic link between money problems and debt problems, by researching and advocating non-partisan practical policy change at government, regulators and companies – that way, its work can impact millions of people.

Current projects include trying to change Council Tax debt collection (strongly needed – see why Council Tax debt's the worst debt), working with banks to prevent gambling harms, piloting embedding debt advice in NHS counselling services and far more (see MMHPI's latest impact report). And while I still chair the charity, it's far from a one-man board, there's a seriously authoritative board of trustees. We’re also celebrating this year, becoming only the 7^th organisation in the UK to get super complainant status.

Crucially, all MMHPI's work is real-world based, as when our team of policy experts come up with solutions, we then ensure it goes through the thousands on the MMHPI lived experience panel to get their views and experience. If you've had money & mental health issues, please do consider joining it.

2. The 'Martin Lewis Coronavirus Poverty Fund': £3.4m. (£2.1m from me, £1.3m raised from others.) At the start of the crisis, in March 2020, my aims were simple...

- To provide urgent relief to those struggling due to the pandemic.
- To use my profile to bring in other donations (started before the official fundraising scheme was in place).
- To do this via small charities, in order to help them survive too, including food banks, domestic abuse charities, cancer groups and more.

At the final tally, I'd put £2.1m in and, wonderfully, after asking others with deep pockets to join, they added £1.3m, all of which meant 415 small charities received an average of £8,000 each at speed.

For full details, including a breakdown of where the money went and how we decided, see my Covid poverty fund – where the money went blog.

NB: While the external donations technically went to my charity fund, so they could be paid out, I haven't included them in the fund totals at the blog's start.

3. Financial education in schools (including textbook) via Young Money: £1.8m. Financial education has long been a campaigning priority for me. I worked with the Young Money (Pfeg) charity in our successful campaign to get financial education on the English national curriculum in 2014. So the charity seemed a natural partner, and I've funded a number of projects since...

- Funding and developing the first curriculum-mapped financial education textbook, and sending 340,000 of them to all English state schools (100 per school). Click for a free PDF download.
- Jointly with the UK's official Money and Pensions Service, which agreed to go halves with me on the additional costs, to do further textbooks for Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, with each of us putting in £162,000.
- To go with the textbook, funding a new teachers' digital e-learning pack to help teachers learn to teach it.
- Funding My Money Week from 2016 to 2018, so children in all UK schools get access to free resources and education on managing money.
- In the last year, I have funded further digital teaching resources to accompany the textbook.

My hope is over the next year or two we will see another leap in financial education. See my recent speech to Parliament on why we need to boost financial education provision in schools.

4. Citizens Advice UK: £2m. Two £1m donations in 2012 and 2015 split across UK nations in proportion to population. I did this partly as I love Citizens Advice's voluntary ethos, but also to expose that debt-counselling funding had been cut by the Government during the recession.

With the second donation, I was delighted they used the money in England to set up the Martin Lewis Citizens Advice Fund (its choice of name, not mine), giving local branches innovation grants to develop new digital and other ways to reach and help more people – which hopefully has paid dividends during the pandemic.

5. Trussell Trust: £650,000. The bulk of this money was for the Trussell Trust to first pilot, then in 2015 roll out, putting financial triage in food banks. Part of the idea was to see if the concept worked so that the food banks could then engage councils and other community stakeholders to do it everywhere. It did work.

Then for Christmas 2022, I also funded a straight £50,000 donation towards food poverty, in light of the terrible cost of living crisis.

6. The MSE Charity: £436,000. This is the total of my personal donation(s) to the MSE Charity since 2012. I set the charity up in 2007 to give grants to small charities working in consumer education or financial empowerment.

This money is separate from MSE's (ie, my) donations before 2012 and MSE's (ie, MONY Group's) donations since. In total, they add up to a further £1.18m (this bit is not included in my charity fund totals at the top of the blog, as it's not from me).

7. Grief Encounter (including the helpline): £207,000. Grief Encounter provides grief counselling and help for children who have lost a parent or sibling. While I normally focus on charities within my expertise, as those who have heard/seen my 2018 BBC Radio 5 Live interview on grief will know, this is something that sadly strongly resonates with me.

I was already a patron of the charity when a couple of years ago they mentioned the idea of a helpline so children who were struggling had someone they could call. It struck a chord. I wished I'd had such a service, so I agreed to fund setting it up and running a year.

As that year ended, Covid hit, demand went up, but funding opportunities elsewhere disappeared, so I agreed to fund a second year to keep it going.

8. The mortgage prisoners campaign: £60,000. Perhaps my most frustrating one on the list. The funds were to write three London School of Economics mortgage prisoners reports, to provide policy solutions to help the 200,000 people unjustly, desperately and life-debilitatingly trapped in closed-book mortgages due to the financial crash. The last report was published in February 2023 and sent to the Government after it'd agreed to look at the solutions. Nothing happened.

There is a now a new Government and we continue to push for justice for these people whose lives have been devastated, made even worse in recent years by the spike in interest rates. Still though, no news.

9. This one's a cheat. £3m to set up Citizens Advice Scams Action (not my money). In 2018, I started a campaigning lawsuit against Facebook for defamation after it kept publishing huge numbers of scam ads with my name and image in. In 2019, I dropped the case, and as part of the settlement it agreed to donate £3m to set up a new anti-scam wing of Citizens Advice, and launch a scam ad reporting tool unique to the UK. For more, see Martin Lewis in possibly record settlement with Facebook.

Three years ago, I wrote: "I'm delighted this year that we also succeeded in persuading/pushing the Government to change its mind and include scam ads in the Online Safety Bill." Finally, that bill is now in place, though sadly Ofcom's regulatory timetable indicates it'll probably be at least two years before we see any meaningful change on it – meanwhile, scam ads on Facebook and elsewhere that feature me and others are still a daily, debilitating scourge.

NB: For clarity, this Facebook money ISN'T included in my fund totals at the top.

Where else money has gone, other smaller projects...

• £165,000 to the Support Through Court helpline. I'd been a patron of this charity, which helps those having to represent themselves in the civil or family courts (due to terrible legal aid cuts). Then Covid hit and its helpline funding ran dry, so I stepped in to help for the year.

• £147,500 to Money Buddies, a Leeds-based financial help counselling charity.

• £110,000 to Demos to fund a digital democracy toolkit, to allow policy suggestions to be worked on with the general public rather than just policy wonks.

• £100,000 to Mind for mental health work.

• £100,000 to National Energy Action to fund a new web chat service in time for the 1 April 2022 54% price hike – in order to relieve pressure on its oversubscribed phone lines.

• £45,000 to the John Schofield Trust to support mentoring, to improve the range of voices in my industry, broadcast journalism, so it's not just those who know someone who get the help.

• £35,000 to First Light Trust for financial triage and drug help for military veterans.

• £20,000 to the RNIB to support those who have lost their sight to manage their financial lives.

• £16,000 to fund the Alzheimer's Society financial services charter.

• £10,000 to Winston's Wish to help children and young people who have lost a parent.

• £10,000 to High Performance Foundation, supporting young people to help improve resilience, mental health and employability skills.

• £8,000 to CILIP to write and publish the A warm welcome: Setting up a warm space in your community report.

There are a substantial number of donations below £8,000 too, but I think that is a good cut-off point.

The (attempt at) logic behind these donations

A 'giving philosophy' at first sounded a bit pratty to me, but I've got used to it as the modern term for deciding what donations you make – and I do try to have a logic behind my decisions.

I've always believed MoneySavingExpert.com, while profit-making, has at its core a public service remit. Its primary job (since 2012, this has been codified and protected by our Editorial Code) is to cut people's bills and fight their corner.

Yet there are many people and sectors a website and broadcasting don't reach or help. So as I'm fortunate enough to have substantial charity funds, I want to fill in some of the gaps that it can't reach. Many of the donations try to do just that. For example...

• Citizens Advice, Money Buddies and National Energy Action give one-on-one help, which a website such as MSE can't do.

• MMHPI helps those with mental health issues, which can impair and impact people's ability to help themselves.

• Trussell Trust financial triage helps many offline without access to crucial information.

• Financial education is there to help prevent future problems.

Of course some donations, such as those to the John Schofield Trust and Grief Encounter, are more personal, but overall I hope there is a cohesion to my giving.

Other charities I work with (often as a patron)

As we're on the subject of charity, and I'm self-auditing, to finish, it is probably also worth noting down those charities I'm a patron of or ambassador for, which I haven't already mentioned.

• The Social Mobility Business Partnership, which gives children from underprivileged backgrounds access to professions and work experience so they're not disadvantaged.

• National Numeracy, to help improve functional numeracy.