I build every calculator on this site and I write the guides that go with them. There is no content team and no freelance byline pool — one person decides what gets built, checks the math, and answers the email. If something here is wrong, it is my mistake and mine to fix.
Why this site exists
I kept running into the same experience: search for a simple calculation, land on a page that loads for six seconds, dismiss two popups, scroll past nine hundred words of throat-clearing, and finally find an input box. The calculation itself takes a fraction of a second. Everything around it was hostile.
So I started building the tools I wanted to use. Fast, no signup, no popups, the answer at the top of the page instead of buried under an essay. That is still the standard I hold every page here to: if you cannot get your answer within a few seconds of the page loading, the page has failed.
How I build the calculators
Every calculator runs entirely in your browser. Your inputs — salary, weight, loan amount, whatever you type — never leave your device and are never sent to a server. That is not a privacy promise I am asking you to take on faith; it is a consequence of how the tools are built, and you can verify it by opening your browser's network tab while you use one.
For anything with a defined formula — mortgage amortization, BMI, tax withholding, unit conversion — I implement the formula from its primary source rather than copying another site's output. Where a calculation depends on data that changes (tax brackets, cost-of-living indexes, salary medians), the source and the vintage are documented on the methodology page.
How I write the guides
The guides exist for questions a calculator cannot answer alone — whether to negotiate or accept, whether to refinance, whether a relocation actually pays. Each one starts from primary sources: IRS publications, Bureau of Labor Statistics and Bureau of Economic Analysis data, lender documentation, published research.
Every number that appears in a guide, I run through the same calculators on this site before it goes into the text. When I show a worked example, those are real outputs, not illustrative approximations. When I cite a figure I did not compute, it comes from a named source you can check.
The guides are written in the first person because they reflect how I actually think about these decisions, including the ones I got wrong. That is a deliberate choice about honesty, not a stylistic one.
What I will not do
- Give you personalized financial, medical, or legal advice. I am not a licensed advisor, accountant, doctor, or attorney. These tools produce estimates for general education. For decisions that matter, talk to someone licensed who knows your situation.
- Publish content I have not checked. If I cannot verify a number against a source, it does not go on the page.
- Sell or share your data. The calculators do not transmit your inputs anywhere, so there is nothing to sell.
- Add popups, interstitials, or newsletter gates. The whole point of this site is that it does not do those things.
Corrections
If you find an error — a wrong formula, stale tax data, a broken calculation, a claim that does not hold up — I want to know. Corrections are the only mechanism a site like this has for staying accurate over time, and I would rather be told than keep publishing something wrong.
Write to me through the contact page. Include the page URL and what you think is wrong. If you are right, I fix it and note the correction date on the page.
See also: about this site · data sources and methodology · all guides