About Clara

Clara Ashton spent her late twenties learning, the hard way, that earning more money does not automatically produce a better life. She had done everything she was told to do: got the degree, took the corporate job, received the promotions. By thirty-one she was earning more than she had ever imagined at twenty-two and feeling, if anything, less financially secure than when she had less, because her spending had expanded to fill every pay rise she had ever received and she had somehow arrived at a salary she would have considered life-changing a decade earlier while living paycheck to paycheck.

That experience, and the three years she subsequently spent reading, questioning, and fundamentally rethinking her relationship with money, is the foundation of Clearly Magazine.

Clara grew up in the north of England, the daughter of a secondary school teacher and an accountant, in a household where money was discussed practically rather than emotionally. She studied English and Economics at university, worked in communications for several years, and then spent five years in financial services marketing, which gave her an unusual combination of skills: the ability to write clearly about complex topics and enough proximity to the financial industry to understand how it works and why it often fails the people it is supposed to serve.

She launched Clearly Magazine because the personal finance content she could find was either written by people with financial credentials and no talent for making the subject human, or by lifestyle creators with no financial background who were sharing advice they were not equipped to give. She wanted something in between: financially literate, genuinely useful, and written in a voice that treated the reader as an intelligent adult rather than either a student or an aspirational consumer.

What Clara believes about money and success

Money is a tool that most people never learn to use properly because the education system does not teach it, because the financial industry has a commercial interest in keeping it confusing, and because cultural norms around talking about money mean that most people navigate one of the most consequential areas of their adult lives with almost no reliable guidance.

Success is a word that has been so thoroughly colonised by social media that it has largely lost contact with what it describes. Clara is interested in a different definition: a life that is genuinely satisfying on your own terms, built on choices that reflect what you actually value rather than what the culture currently signals that you should value. That definition requires clarity about what you want, which requires the kind of sustained honest thinking that most people avoid because it is uncomfortable.

Clearly Magazine exists for people who are prepared to do that thinking.

Background

Clara holds a BA in English and Economics and has a background in financial services marketing spanning five years. She is a qualified Mental Health First Aider and has completed a financial coaching qualification through the Chartered Institute for Securities and Investment. She is based in Manchester.

She founded Clearly Magazine in her early thirties, initially as a newsletter sent to forty-two subscribers (all of whom she knew personally), and has built it from there through consistent publishing and a refusal to write anything she does not genuinely think is worth a reader’s time.