Terms and Conditions

Welcome to Financial Expert Class. These Terms and Conditions (the “Terms”, the “Agreement”) form a legally binding contract between you and the operator of this website. They are written in plain English wherever possible, with the precise legal terms kept where they matter. Please read them carefully before you continue using the Site. If anything is unclear, email [email protected] before you rely on the Site.

Last reviewed: 28 May 2026. Next scheduled review: 28 November 2026. See section 26 for the full document-control log.

Document control and what changed in this revision

In plain English: this is the May 2026 rewrite. It strengthens the legal and YMYL safety wording without changing how we operate.

This is a substantial rewrite of the prior published version of these Terms. The May 2026 revision adds: a named UK operating entity (Aurum Digital Marketing LTD), an English-law governing-law clause, a clear “not financial advice” block for YMYL (Your Money, Your Life) content, a takedown procedure, an AI-training prohibition, a consumer-aware liability cap, and explicit cross-references to our Privacy Policy, Affiliate Disclosure and Editorial Process. Material changes will be summarised at the top of this page for at least 30 days after each update.

1. Acceptance of these Terms

By accessing, browsing, downloading, printing, sharing or otherwise using financialexpertclass.com (the “Site”), you confirm that you have read, understood and agree to be bound by these Terms, our Privacy Policy, our Affiliate Disclosure and our Editorial Process. Together, these documents form the entire agreement between you and us regarding your use of the Site.

If you do not agree with any part of these Terms, you must stop using the Site immediately. Continued use after the “Last reviewed” date at the top of this page constitutes your acceptance of the version then in force.

2. The parties to this agreement

In these Terms:

“We”, “us”, “our” and “Aurum” mean Aurum Digital Marketing LTD, a private limited company registered in England and Wales (company number 15203665), with registered office at Flat 18 Block N Peabody Buildings, Wild Street, London, England, WC2B 4BX, trading as Financial Expert Class.
“You” and “your” mean any individual or legal entity that visits, reads, downloads from, links to, comments on or otherwise interacts with the Site.

You can contact us at any time at [email protected] or through the form on our Contact page.

3. Eligibility to use the Site

You may only use the Site if you are at least 18 years old (or the age of majority and legal capacity to contract in your country of residence, if higher) and you have the legal capacity to enter into a binding contract under the law of that country. By using the Site you represent and warrant that you meet these requirements. We ask that parents and guardians supervise any use of the Site by minors in their household; the Site is not designed for under-18s and we do not knowingly collect personal data from minors (see our Privacy Policy).

The Site is operated from the United Kingdom but is generally available worldwide. It is your responsibility to check that your use of the Site, and any reliance on its educational content, is lawful in the country where you live and where you invest.

4. Definitions

In these Terms the following capitalised words have the meanings set out below:

Site — the website published at https://financialexpertclass.com/ and any sub-domain operated by Aurum.
Content — all text, articles, guides, comparisons, screenshots, photographs, illustrations, charts, calculators, JavaScript components, code snippets, audio and video published on the Site.
User — any natural or legal person accessing the Site, with or without an account.
User-Generated Content (“UGC”) — anything you submit to the Site, including comments, ratings, contact-form messages, email replies to our newsletter and any other text or media you send us.
Substack — the paid newsletter operated by Kestutis Balciunas at https://getdividends.net/, governed by Substack’s own terms in addition to these Terms.
Affiliate Link — an external link to a third-party product or broker that may pay Aurum a referral fee if you sign up, as fully disclosed in our Affiliate Disclosure.
Editorial Process — our published methodology, research sources, review cadence and corrections policy, available at /editorial-process/.
Aurum — Aurum Digital Marketing LTD (the operating entity described in section 2).

5. Permitted use of the Site

We’re happy for you to read, learn from and quietly share the Site. Specifically, you may, free of charge and without our prior written permission:

Read the Content on screen for your personal, non-commercial use.
Print or save individual pages for your own private research or for use within your household.
Share a link to any page of the Site on social media, in your own newsletter, in a Bogleheads-style forum thread or in a personal blog post.
Quote up to 100 words of text from a single article in a review, critique, blog post or academic work, provided that you (a) attribute the quote to “Financial Expert Class” or to the named author, and (b) include a clear hyperlink to the canonical source page on https://financialexpertclass.com/.
Use our published RSS feed in a personal feed reader.

This contractual permission is in addition to, and does not limit, any fair-dealing or other statutory exception under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 (including ss.29–30A on research, private study, criticism, review, quotation, news reporting and pastiche).

Any use of the Site that goes beyond the limits set out above requires our prior written permission. Please email [email protected] with your request, and we’ll respond within five UK working days.

6. Prohibited use of the Site

To protect our readers and the integrity of our research, you must not:

Republish, syndicate or mirror the Content in whole or in substantial part on any other website, app, platform or printed publication without our prior written consent.
Scrape, crawl or harvest the Site (other than by well-behaved search-engine bots that respect robots.txt) for the purpose of republication or competitive analysis.
Use the Content, in whole or in part, to train, fine-tune or evaluate any artificial-intelligence model, large language model, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) system — i.e. an AI that fetches outside text to answer questions — or similar product, without our prior written permission. This includes any use of the Site as a data source for commercial AI products. This prohibition is reinforced by the directives we publish (or plan to publish) in robots.txt and in HTTP response headers for known AI crawlers including GPTBot, Google-Extended, ClaudeBot, anthropic-ai, CCBot, PerplexityBot and Bytespider.
Frame, embed or in-line the Site within another site so as to give the impression that the Content originates from a third party.
Remove, obscure or alter any copyright, trademark, author by-line or other proprietary notice on the Content.
Perform automated mass-downloads, denial-of-service or stress-testing attacks against the Site.
Reverse engineer, decompile or attempt to derive the source of any calculator, JavaScript or other software component on the Site, except to the extent that such restriction is prohibited by applicable law.
Upload, post or transmit any virus, worm, trojan, ransomware or other malicious code.
Use any contact form, comment field or email reply on the Site to send spam, phishing messages or unsolicited commercial communications.
Attempt to gain unauthorised access to the Site, our servers, our hosting environment or any data we hold about other Users.
Infringe the intellectual-property rights, privacy rights or other legal rights of any third party.
Use the Site to facilitate any activity that is illegal under the laws of the United Kingdom, the European Union or your country of residence, including market manipulation, insider dealing or money laundering.

We take breaches of this section seriously. We may report serious or repeated breaches to the relevant law-enforcement or regulatory authorities, and we reserve all remedies available to us under English law and otherwise.

7. Intellectual property rights

All Content on the Site is either owned by Aurum Digital Marketing LTD or used by us under licence. This includes (without limitation) the text of every article, the structure and selection of our “Best [Issuer] ETFs for European Investors” series, the methodology of our broker comparisons, our custom calculators, our internal screenshots and our editorial illustrations. All rights are reserved.

The Financial Expert Class name and any associated logos are unregistered trademarks of Aurum Digital Marketing LTD. Third-party trademarks (for example, names and logos of brokers such as Freedom24, Interactive Brokers, XTB, Nexo and Trade Republic, or of index providers such as MSCI, FTSE Russell and S&P Dow Jones Indices) are the property of their respective holders and are used on the Site for identification and review purposes only, without any implied endorsement.

Where we reproduce data from third-party sources — for example issuer factsheets, KIDs and PRIIPs documents, regulator pages such as FCA, BaFin, CySEC, KNF or ESMA, or data from justETF, Morningstar and ETF.com — we do so under the relevant fair-dealing (UK) or fair-use (US) exceptions — i.e. the legal allowances to quote and discuss copyrighted material for criticism, review and education — and we credit the source. Those third-party rights remain with the original holders.

8. User-generated content (comments and form submissions)

In plain English: if you comment or email us, we can republish, edit, translate or quote what you sent us — for free, anywhere we publish — but you still own it, and you can ask us to remove it.

You retain the underlying ownership of anything you submit to the Site (your “UGC”). By submitting UGC — for example by posting a blog comment, sending a contact-form message, replying to our newsletter or emailing us a suggestion — you grant Aurum a non-exclusive, royalty-free, worldwide, sub-licensable licence to host, display, moderate, edit for clarity and length, excerpt, translate and otherwise use that UGC.

That licence is granted only to the extent necessary to operate, promote and archive the Site and our directly-affiliated channels: our Substack newsletter at getdividends.net, and our author profiles on Medium, LinkedIn and X. The sub-licence right is limited to platforms reasonably required to display the UGC; it does not extend to unrelated commercial reuse.

Your right to ask for removal: you may request removal of your UGC at any time by emailing [email protected]. We will remove the visible copy within a reasonable time, subject to our right to retain archived or cached copies for legal, audit and back-up purposes.

You warrant that:

You have all the rights, consents and permissions necessary to grant the licence above.
Your UGC is accurate to the best of your knowledge.
Your UGC does not infringe the intellectual-property rights, privacy rights, confidentiality or any other rights of any third party.
Your UGC is not unlawful, defamatory, obscene, harassing, hateful, sexually explicit, threatening or otherwise objectionable.
Your UGC does not contain any unsolicited financial advice presented as if it were professional advice, and does not promote any unregulated investment scheme.

We may, at our sole editorial discretion and without any obligation to you, choose not to publish any UGC, to edit it for clarity or length, to add an editor’s note, to remove it after publication, or to ban repeat offenders from commenting. We are under no obligation to monitor UGC pro-actively, but where we become aware of UGC that appears to breach these Terms we will act on it promptly.

9. Takedown policy for rights-holders

If you are the holder of a copyright, trademark or other right that you believe has been infringed by Content on the Site, please send a written notice to [email protected] containing:

Your full name, postal address, email address and, if you are acting on behalf of a rights-holder, the rights-holder’s name and your authority to act.
A clear identification of the work or right you say has been infringed (for example, a link to the original work, or a copy of the trademark registration).
The exact URL(s) on financialexpertclass.com where the alleged infringement appears.
A statement that you have a good-faith belief that the use complained of is not authorised by the rights-holder, its agent or the law.
A statement that the information in your notice is true and accurate to the best of your knowledge and belief, and that you understand that knowingly making a false statement (whether under English law or under the law of your country, where false statements in such a notice are treated as a criminal offence) may have legal consequences.
Your signature (electronic signatures are accepted).

We will acknowledge your notice within 5 UK working days and will aim to respond substantively within 10 UK working days, acting expeditiously in line with Regulation 19 of the Electronic Commerce (EC Directive) Regulations 2002. Where we agree the complaint has merit we will remove or amend the affected Content. Where we disagree we will explain why.

Counter-notice: a User whose Content has been removed under this procedure may submit a counter-notice using the same email channel. The counter-notice should contain: (i) the User’s full name and contact details; (ii) identification of the removed Content and the URL where it appeared; (iii) a statement, made in good faith, that the removal resulted from mistake or misidentification of the material; (iv) consent to the jurisdiction of the courts of England and Wales; and (v) the User’s electronic signature. We will consider counter-notices on the same 5/10-working-day timetable.

10. Third-party links and affiliate relationships

The Site contains links to third-party websites, including (without limitation) broker pages, issuer factsheets, regulator publications and online communities such as the Bogleheads forum. Some of those links are Affiliate Links: if you click them and open an account or buy a product, the third party may pay Aurum a referral fee. This never changes the price you pay and never influences our editorial conclusions; full details, including the list of currently active affiliate partners (Freedom24, Interactive Brokers, XTB, Nexo and Trade Republic), are set out in our Affiliate Disclosure.

We have no control over the content, privacy practices, terms of service, pricing, product availability, regulatory status or commercial outcomes of any third-party site, broker or product we link to. We are not responsible for any loss or damage you may suffer as a result of dealing with any third party you reach via the Site. Before you open a brokerage account or invest in any product, read the third party’s own terms, fee schedule, risk warnings and KID/PRIIPs documents in full, and confirm that the entity is regulated by an authority you trust (for EU investors, that typically means a national regulator such as CySEC, BaFin or KNF, or ESMA-registered firms).

11. Important — this Site does NOT provide financial advice

⚠ Risk warning — educational content only. Not personalised financial, tax or legal advice.

Everything you read on financialexpertclass.com is published for general educational and informational purposes. It reflects the author’s personal research and his lived experience as a European retail investor over 11+ years of self-directed passive and dividend-ETF investing (see About Me and our Editorial Process for methodology, sources and corrections). It is not a recommendation that any particular security, fund, broker, strategy, allocation or product is suitable for you.

Aurum Digital Marketing LTD is NOT a regulated financial adviser, broker-dealer, fund manager, portfolio manager, investment manager, tax adviser or legal adviser in the United Kingdom, the European Union, the United States or any other jurisdiction. We do not provide any service that constitutes “regulated activity” under the UK Financial Services and Markets Act 2000 or analogous EU and national rules. We do not hold client money. We do not execute trades on your behalf. We do not manage portfolios.

Nothing on the Site is intended to constitute a “personal recommendation” or “investment advice” within the meaning of MiFID II, the FCA Handbook (including COBS 9 and COBS 9A) or the EU Markets in Financial Instruments Directive. The Site is generic, impersonal, factual and educational content directed at a general European audience.

Nothing on the Site — including the “Best [Issuer] ETFs” series, broker comparisons, model portfolios, dividend calendars, calculators, screenshots, comments or our Substack archive at getdividends.net — constitutes a personal recommendation, an offer or a solicitation to buy or sell any financial instrument, or to engage in any other transaction.

Past performance is not a reliable indicator of future results. Investing carries the risk of loss of capital. With leveraged products, derivatives or margin trading you may lose more than the amount you originally invested. Currency movements, withholding-tax rules, ETF domicile and product structure (UCITS vs. US-domiciled, accumulating vs. distributing) can all materially change your real-world outcome.

Before acting on anything you read here, consult a licensed financial adviser, tax adviser and/or lawyer in your country of residence. If you do not have one, you can find regulated firms via your national regulator — for example the FCA Financial Services Register in the UK, BaFin in Germany, the CySEC public register in Cyprus or KNF in Poland. If you have a complaint about a regulated firm, escalate it to your national financial ombudsman — for example the UK Financial Ombudsman Service, or the equivalent body in your country.

12. No fiduciary or advisory duty

You acknowledge and agree that no fiduciary, advisory, broker, agent, trust or similar relationship is created between you and Aurum, the named author Kestutis Balciunas, any guest contributor or any commenter on the Site, by virtue of your accessing the Site, reading the Content, subscribing to the free or paid newsletter, or interacting with us by email. We owe you no duty of care in respect of any investment decision you make, and you must not treat the Site as a substitute for advice from a regulated professional.

13. Limitation of liability

In plain English: the Site is provided as it is. We are not on the hook for knock-on losses such as missed profits or lost trading opportunities. Our total payout to any one reader in a year is capped — but if you are a consumer, the law protects you and that cap will not be applied unfairly.

The Site and all Content are provided on an “as is” and “as available” basis. To the maximum extent permitted by English law, Aurum, its directors, employees, contractors and contributors:

Except for warranties, terms and conditions that cannot be excluded or limited under English law (including under the Consumer Rights Act 2015), and to the maximum extent permitted by law, make no representations or warranties of any kind, express or implied, including any warranty of accuracy, completeness, timeliness, suitability, fitness for a particular purpose, non-infringement or uninterrupted availability of the Site. Nothing in this bullet affects the implied terms about reasonable care and skill (and other consumer service rights) that apply under the Consumer Rights Act 2015.
Exclude all liability for any indirect, special, incidental, punitive or consequential loss. This includes (without limitation) loss of profits, loss of revenue, loss of investment returns, loss of trading opportunity, loss of data, loss of anticipated savings, loss of business opportunity, loss of goodwill and loss of reputation. The exclusion applies however the loss is caused, whether in contract, in tort (a non-contractual civil wrong, including negligence), for breach of statutory duty, or otherwise.
Our total liability to any one User for all claims arising in any 12-month period is capped at the greater of (i) GBP 500, or (ii) the total fees (if any) you paid us during that 12-month period.

Consumer protection comes first. If you are dealing with us as a consumer, the cap and the warranty disclaimer above apply only to the extent they are fair and reasonable under the Consumer Rights Act 2015; if a court or regulator considers any part of them unfair, that part will not apply to you, and our liability to you will be as provided by law.

Nothing in these Terms excludes or limits our liability for:

Death or personal injury caused by our negligence.
Fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation by us.
Any other liability that cannot be limited or excluded under English law, including under the Consumer Rights Act 2015 and the Unfair Contract Terms Act 1977.

If you are a consumer, this section does not affect your statutory rights.

14. Indemnification by you

In plain English: if someone else sues us because of something you did wrong on the Site, you agree to cover our reasonable costs.

You agree to defend, indemnify and hold harmless Aurum Digital Marketing LTD, its directors, employees, contractors and contributors, from and against any third-party claim, demand or proceeding arising out of or in connection with: (a) your breach of these Terms; (b) your unlawful or negligent use of the Site; (c) your UGC; or (d) your infringement of any intellectual-property right, privacy right or other right of a third party. The cover extends to reasonable losses, damages, liabilities, costs and expenses, including reasonable legal fees.

15. Termination and suspension of access

We may suspend or terminate your access to the Site at any time, with or without notice, where we reasonably believe that you have materially breached these Terms, that your use of the Site is creating risk for us or other Users, or where we are required to do so by law or by order of a competent authority. Termination does not affect any rights or remedies that have accrued before termination. The provisions of sections 7, 8, 9, 11, 12, 13, 14, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25 and 26 survive termination (i.e. continue to apply even after your access ends).

16. Changes to these Terms

We may update these Terms from time to time to reflect changes in our practice, the law, the regulatory environment or the products we link to. The current version is always available at https://financialexpertclass.com/terms-and-conditions/, with the date shown next to “Last reviewed” at the top of this page. Material changes will be summarised in a short notice at the top of the page for at least 30 days. Continued use of the Site after the “Last reviewed” date constitutes acceptance of the revised Terms.

17. Entire agreement

These Terms, together with our Privacy Policy, our Affiliate Disclosure and our Editorial Process, constitute the entire agreement between you and Aurum regarding your use of the Site, and supersede any prior agreement or understanding between us in respect of that subject matter.

18. Severability

In plain English: if a court strikes down one part of these Terms, the rest still applies.

If any provision of these Terms is held by a competent court to be invalid, illegal or unenforceable, that provision will be narrowed to the minimum extent needed to make it valid and enforceable. If narrowing is not possible, the provision will be deleted. In either case, the remaining provisions stay in full force and effect.

19. No waiver

In plain English: if we do not enforce one of these Terms straight away, that does not mean we have given up the right to enforce it later.

No failure or delay by us in exercising any right under these Terms operates as a waiver of that right. A single or partial exercise of any right does not prevent any other or further exercise of that right, or of any other right.

20. Assignment

In plain English: you cannot pass your rights here to someone else, but we can transfer ours if our business is sold.

You may not assign, transfer or sub-contract any of your rights or obligations under these Terms without our prior written consent. We may assign, transfer or novate (legally transfer in full) our rights and obligations under these Terms to any successor in business, any member of our group of companies, or any purchaser of all or substantially all of the assets of the Site.

21. Force majeure (events beyond our control)

In plain English: if something outside our reasonable control stops us doing what these Terms require, we are not liable for the delay or failure.

We shall not be liable for any failure or delay in performing our obligations under these Terms where that failure or delay results from any cause beyond our reasonable control, including (without limitation) acts of God, war, terrorism, civil unrest, government action, sanctions, pandemic, internet outage, hosting-provider failure, DNS or CDN failure, domain registrar failure, third-party API or plugin failure, cyber-attack, electricity failure, strike action, and any failure of services provided by Google, Cloudflare or our hosting partner.

22. Third-party rights

A person who is not a party to these Terms has no right under the Contracts (Rights of Third Parties) Act 1999 to enforce any of these Terms. This does not affect any right or remedy of a third party which exists, or is available, apart from that Act.

23. Governing law

These Terms, and any non-contractual obligations arising out of or in connection with them, are governed by and construed in accordance with the laws of England and Wales, to the exclusion of its conflict-of-laws rules.

24. Jurisdiction

In plain English: most legal disputes about the Site must be brought in the courts of England and Wales — but EU consumers keep their local-court rights.

If you are a consumer resident in the EU, the EEA or another jurisdiction whose laws give you a non-waivable right to sue in your local courts (for example under Articles 17–19 of Regulation (EU) 1215/2012 (Brussels Ia)), nothing in this section overrides that right. Otherwise, you and we agree that the courts of England and Wales have exclusive jurisdiction to settle any dispute or claim (including non-contractual disputes — i.e. disputes that do not arise from the contract itself, such as alleged negligence or misrepresentation) arising out of or in connection with these Terms, the Site or the Content.

25. Contact and legal notices

All notices to us under these Terms (including legal notices, takedown requests under section 9, GDPR/UK-GDPR data-subject requests, and counter-notices) must be sent to:

By email: [email protected] (acknowledged within 5 UK working days; substantive response within the time-frames set out in the relevant section).
By post: Aurum Digital Marketing LTD, Flat 18 Block N Peabody Buildings, Wild Street, London, England, WC2B 4BX, marked “Legal Notice – Financial Expert Class”.

For non-legal questions — editorial feedback, a correction, a guest-post pitch or a media enquiry — please use the Contact page or the Help & FAQ. For information about who runs the Site, see About Me.

26. Document control and review cadence

We treat these Terms as a living document and review them on a fixed cadence.

Owner: Kestutis Balciunas, on behalf of Aurum Digital Marketing LTD.
Originally published: 2025 (exact original publication date verified from WordPress post meta).
Last reviewed: 28 May 2026.
Next scheduled review: 28 November 2026 (every 6 months).
Trigger-based reviews: any material change to the Site, any new affiliate partner, any change in UK or EU law affecting online publishers or financial-education websites, any change to ICO or EDPB guidance, or any reader complaint that surfaces a gap in this document.
Change log: material changes are summarised in a notice at the top of this page for at least 30 days after each revision.

To get the full picture of how Financial Expert Class operates, please read these documents alongside this one:

Privacy Policy — what personal data we collect, why, our lawful bases under UK GDPR / EU GDPR, and your rights. See also the UK ICO and the European Data Protection Board.
Affiliate Disclosure — the full list of broker partners (Freedom24, Interactive Brokers, XTB, Nexo, Trade Republic), how we get paid, and why this never changes our editorial conclusions.
Editorial Process — our research methodology, the sources we lean on (issuer KIDs/PRIIPs, justETF, Morningstar, Bogleheads), our fact-checking and our corrections policy.
About Me — who Kestutis is, why he writes for European retail investors, and an honest statement that he is self-taught and not a regulated financial adviser.
Contact and Help & FAQ — how to reach us, expected response times and answers to the questions readers ask most often.
Get Dividends on Substack — the paid newsletter, governed by Substack’s terms in addition to these Terms.

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