Money & Finance

Money tools are only useful if they are honest about what they leave out, and most are not. A mortgage payment is not the cost of owning a house. A headline savings rate is not what your money is really earning. An hourly rate divided into a salary is not what your time is worth. The calculators here are built around those gaps rather than around them.

If you are carrying debt, start with the debt payoff calculator. It simulates every debt you hold month by month and compares paying the highest rate first against paying the smallest balance first, on your numbers rather than a generic example. The gap between the two methods is frequently much smaller than the argument about them suggests, and knowing your actual figure is what makes the decision easy.

For a purchase or a loan, the loan calculator separates interest from principal so you can see how much of an early payment buys you nothing. The rent versus buy calculator does the same job for housing, including the costs people leave out: maintenance, insurance, transaction taxes at both ends, and what a deposit would have earned if it were invested instead. Set house price growth to zero and see whether the case still stands.

For income, the freelance rate calculator works backwards from what you want to take home, through tax, business costs and the fact that most freelancers bill only half to two thirds of the hours they work. The salary and overtime calculators do the equivalent job for employment, and the inflation calculator tells you whether a pay rise was actually a rise.

None of this is regulated financial advice, and it does not know your circumstances. For problem debt specifically, free help from a charity such as StepChange or National Debtline is better than any calculator, and it costs nothing. Nothing you enter here is sent anywhere.