Hi. We're Jonathan and Steve.
We built The Yukon Project because we were both tired of an industry that profits when people stay confused. This is the whole story, not just the short version.
(90 seconds, no suits)
The short version is we got annoyed
Jonathan spent six years underwriting personal loans. Most of that time was spent watching genuinely good people — people who paid their bills, who weren't reckless with money — get quietly steered into worse rates than they qualified for, simply because nobody ever explained the alternative sitting right next to it.
He'd bring it up at dinner. Repeatedly. Eventually Steve, who'd spent years reading contracts for a living and has an unusually high tolerance for fine print, said something like "so why doesn't someone just build the version that tells people the truth first." That was basically the whole business plan.
I didn't leave lending because I hated it. I left because I kept seeing the same fixable problem and nobody upstream wanted to fix it. This felt more useful.
So that's what this is: two people who know this industry from the inside, building the thing we wish had existed when we were the ones staring at a credit card statement doing math we didn't want to be doing.
Who's actually behind this
Jonathan
Spent six years underwriting personal loans before starting The Yukon Project. Handles the lender relationships and most of the on-camera explaining, whether or not anyone asked him to explain something.
will talk your ear off about APR given the chanceSteve
Reads every word of every lender's terms and conditions — nights, weekends, whatever it takes. If there's a fee he can't explain to you in one sentence, that lender doesn't stay on the list.
has genuinely strong feelings about origination feesA rough timeline
The idea, and the first version of the calculator
Started with a spreadsheet Jonathan used to explain consolidation math to friends. That spreadsheet became the debt payoff calculator.
First lender partnerships
Vetted and onboarded the first handful of lenders to the network — the same "would we send our own family here" standard we still use today.
The channel started
Started making short videos explaining the stuff we kept repeating in person — minimum payment traps, how card companies actually make money, the rest of it.
40+ lenders, still just the two of us
The network's grown. The team hasn't, on purpose — we'd rather stay small and actually read the fine print than scale past the point where we still can.
The stuff we don't compromise on
Your info doesn't get sold to some spam-call warehouse. Full stop.
No fee gets hidden in fine print we wouldn't say out loud to your face.
If we genuinely can't help, we'll say so — and point you somewhere that can.
When you take a loan through a lender in our network, that lender pays us a referral fee. That's the whole business model — it's how this site, the calculator, and every guide on it stays free for you.
That fee is the same no matter which lender you pick, so we've got zero financial reason to nudge you toward one over another. If a lender ever asked us to rank them higher than they earned, we'd drop them instead of promoting them.
A useful next layer
Why Our Videos exist
Financial products are easier to compare when the numbers are visible and the language is plain. The Yukon Project is built to help people slow down, ask better questions, and make their own decision with the relevant details in view.
Use this page as a starting point, then verify current details in the lender or provider disclosure.
