Who is Martin Lewis

Martin specialised into MoneySaving on a small, now defunct, Sky Channel called Simply Money. After that he started writing a column for the Sunday Express and started his first terrestrial Money Saving Expert slot on Open House with Gloria Hunniford.

Before focusing on MoneySaving, he worked on personal finance and business programmes in the BBC's Business unit and has reported for BBC1, BBC Network Radio and even spent time as a Business Editor of Radio 4's Today Programme. Prior to that he worked 'for the other side' as a City Spin Doctor, advising major companies on how to communicate, and dabbled in stand up comedy to 'relieve the tedium' at the time.

Martin has a postgraduate degree in Broadcast Journalism from Cardiff University, and is a graduate of the London School of Economics, where he was also General Secretary (President) of the Students' Union.

"I'd been working as 'the Money Saving Expert' since June 2000 and was already lucky enough to have a newspaper column and regular slots on different TV and radio programmes. During the course of my research, I began to send tips to my friends as and when I spotted a good deal during my research. Jokingly I called it 'Martin's Money Tips'."

"After a couple of months, I was at a party and people I'd not met kept thanking me for the e-mails. It turned out my friends were forwarding it to their friends, so to make it easier, I set up an e-mail list built around a basic homepage."

"The e-mail took off with 1,000 recipients, so I decided the site had potential to help me promote my journalism work, and I paid a web designer in Uzbekistan £100 to design a proper site. This was launched on 20 February 2003, which for me is when it really started."

"Frankly the growth of the site after that astounds me. It luckily coincided with more high profile broadcast work, which helped build my reputation and thus bring people to the site. And vice versa, the site's growth also helped bolster my reputation, bringing more TV work."

"Now, only a few years later (as at 27 Feb '07) there are nearly 6 million visits a month to the site from 2.48 million people in the UK and over 1,000,000 people who have added themselves to the distribution list to receive the weekly e-mail."

"Writing and running the site now takes most of my week, and I'm more than ably assisted these days by a team. I'm staggered by how it all happened, but very grateful, and hope the site will go from strength to strength, continuing to be a true force to be reckoned with by companies, and a place consumers can call home!"

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