Disclaimer

ShouldIFinance.com is a personal, independent educational project. It exists to explain how common financial calculations work — what drives a mortgage payment, why a longer loan term lowers the payment and raises the cost, how depreciation compares with interest, what a money factor means.

The Site is not: a lender, a creditor, a mortgage broker, a loan originator acting in that capacity, a real-estate brokerage, a bank, a credit union, a registered investment adviser, a broker-dealer, an insurance producer, a certified public accountant, an enrolled agent, a tax preparer or a law firm. It does not originate, arrange, underwrite, fund, service or refer loans. It does not manage money, recommend securities, sell insurance, prepare returns or practise law.

The Site is not affiliated with, sponsored by, endorsed by or operated on behalf of any lender, bank, brokerage, insurer or financial institution. No content here should be read as representing the views, products, rates or programs of any such institution.

The Site's owner works in the mortgage industry and holds a professional license in that field. That fact is disclosed here for transparency, and it changes nothing about how this Site should be treated.

This Site is a separate personal project. It is operated independently, in the owner's own capacity, and it is not operated by, for or on behalf of the owner's employer or any licensed entity. Nothing published here is a communication made in a licensed capacity, and reading it does not make you a customer, client, applicant or prospect of the owner or of any company the owner is associated with.

Where the written guides or the rates page carry advertising, it is served automatically by Google: neither the Site nor its owner selects, reviews or endorses the advertisements that appear, and none is a communication from the owner or from any institution the owner is associated with. An advertisement is not a recommendation, and no advertiser has any influence over the calculators, the guides, the rates shown, or the conclusions any of them reaches.

If you are looking for a loan, approach a licensed lender or broker directly and rely on the disclosures they are legally required to give you — a Loan Estimate, a Closing Disclosure, and the terms of a written commitment. Those documents govern; this Site does not.

The content and calculators on this Site are general information published to the world at large. They are not financial advice, investment advice, tax advice, legal advice, accounting advice, insurance advice or a recommendation to take or refrain from any course of action.

The Site does not know your income, credit history, assets, debts, employment, tax position, family circumstances, risk tolerance, time horizon or goals — beyond whatever you type into a box, which it neither verifies nor retains. No output is tailored to you, because nothing here can see you. Two people entering identical numbers receive identical results; that is the nature of a calculator and the opposite of advice.

Using this Site, reading it, relying on it or contacting its owner about it does not create a client relationship, an advisory relationship, an agency relationship, an engagement or a fiduciary duty of any kind. No duty of care, loyalty, suitability or best-interest is owed to you in respect of anything on this Site.

Correspondence sent through this Site is not confidential and is not privileged. Do not send account numbers, Social Security numbers, credit details or other sensitive personal information.

Every number this Site produces is an estimate generated from assumptions you supplied. Change an assumption and the answer changes. That is the point of the tools, and it is also the limit of them.

No result on this Site is:

• an offer or solicitation to lend, or an offer of credit on any terms;
• a quote, a rate quote or a rate lock;
• a pre-qualification, a pre-approval, a conditional approval or an underwriting decision;
• a commitment to lend, or evidence that credit is available to you at any price;
• an appraisal, a valuation, or an opinion of value for any property or vehicle;
• a tax return, a tax opinion, or a determination of what you owe;
• a recommendation to buy, sell or hold any security, insurance product or asset.

What you can actually borrow, at what rate, on what terms, and what you will actually owe in tax, is determined by a lender's underwriting and by the tax authorities — using verified information, their own methods and their own overlays. Those figures routinely differ from anything estimated here.

Interest rates change daily. Tax law, contribution limits, credit eligibility, program rules, lender overlays, insurance pricing and market values all change, sometimes with little notice and sometimes retroactively.

Several calculators on this Site cite specific published figures for a specific period — federal tax brackets and standard deductions for the 2026 tax year, retirement contribution limits, long-term capital gains thresholds, statutory surtax thresholds, federal clean-vehicle credit rules and their expiry, long-run market return data, and industry depreciation and fund-expense studies. Each is sourced in the page that uses it. Each was accurate as published on the date shown at the top of this page. None of them stays accurate indefinitely.

A calculator that was right last year may be quietly wrong this year. Check the underlying figure against its original source before relying on it, and treat the tax year named on a page as a hard boundary on that page's usefulness.

The 43 calculators also embed modelling assumptions — constant rates of return, straight-line depreciation, steady inflation, no job loss, no market crash, no change in circumstances. Real life includes all of those. Projections are a central estimate under assumptions that will not hold exactly, not a forecast of what will happen.

The mortgage rate shown on the home page is the 30-year fixed-rate average from Freddie Mac's Primary Mortgage Market Survey, reproduced unaltered and labelled with the week the survey covers. The survey is published weekly, on Thursdays. Freddie Mac provides it “as is”, without warranty as to accuracy, and disclaims liability for any use made of it.

It is a national average of conventional, conforming, single-family purchase originations. It is not a quote, not an offer, and not the rate you will be given. Your own rate depends on your credit, your down payment, the loan type, the property, the day, and the lender. Averages routinely differ from individual quotes by more than a percentage point in both directions.

The figure is retrieved when the Site is built, not when you visit, so your browser does not contact Freddie Mac to display it. If the retrieval fails, or the most recent survey becomes more than ten days old, the rate is removed from the Site rather than shown as current.

The calculators are written and checked with care, but they may contain errors in formula, assumption, data or presentation. No representation is made that any calculation is free of defects or suitable for any purpose. If you find something that looks wrong, please report it to shouldifinance@gmail.com — corrections are welcome and are made as promptly as they can be.

Before acting on anything you read or calculate here, consult a professional licensed and qualified to advise you in the relevant field and jurisdiction — a mortgage loan originator or lender for borrowing, a CPA or enrolled agent for tax, an attorney for legal questions, a registered investment adviser for investment decisions, and a licensed producer for insurance. Bring your own numbers and your own documents. A professional who can see your whole position will reach a better answer than any calculator can.

Decisions you make are your own, and you are responsible for them. See the Terms of Use for the warranty disclaimers and limitation of liability that apply to this Site.