Privacy Policy

The calculators are client-side programs. When you type a purchase price, a salary, a loan balance or any other figure, that value is held in your browser's memory and used to compute the result shown on screen. It is not transmitted to us or to anyone else, not stored in a database, and not retained after you close or reload the page.

This is the claim worth holding the Site to, and it does not depend on anything else on this page. Whatever else the Site may come to load — measurement, an embedded widget, advertising — the figures you type into a calculator are computed where you typed them. Nothing carries them off the page, because no such mechanism was built.

There are also no accounts, no sign-up and no login, so there is nothing to attach a calculation to even if one were captured.

The form takes a message, which is required, and an email address, which is not. Leave the address blank and the message arrives with no way to reply to it. There is also an unticked checkbox — “Email me occasionally about new calculators and guides” — and whether you ticked it is sent with the message, as a plain Yes or No, so that a declined opt-in is recorded as a decision rather than as a missing field.

Those three values are the whole submission. Nothing is added to it: no page history, no identifier, no device information gathered in the background, and nothing carried over from anywhere else on the Site.

Who processes it. The form posts to Web3Forms, operated by Web3Creative, which converts the submission into an email and delivers it to the address on the Contact page. For that data this Site is the controller and Web3Forms is a processor acting on its instructions, under their published Data Processing Agreement. Their infrastructure is Amazon Web Services, Cloudflare and Hetzner; transfers out of the EEA, UK or Switzerland are made under Standard Contractual Clauses.

How long they keep it. Web3Forms’ privacy policy states that form submission data is retained for a maximum of three years from the date of submission and then automatically deleted. The message also sits in an ordinary email inbox afterwards, and is kept only as long as it is useful to keep — see section 10.

Spam filtering. To block automated submissions, Web3Forms names CleanTalk and Akismet as spam-prevention providers, and states that the IP address and email address of a form submitter may be sent to them. That is disclosed here because it is the one part of sending this form that reaches a company neither you nor this Site chose directly. The form itself loads no captcha and no third-party script; the only bot protection on the page is a hidden field that a person never sees.

The opt-in. Ticking the box records that you would like occasional email about new calculators and guides. There is no mailing list at the time of writing, so ticking it adds you to nothing that exists yet; it is a stated preference, held with your message, and it will be honoured as an opt-in if a list is ever started. Leaving it unticked is the default and costs you nothing.

You can avoid the form entirely. The email address is published on the Contact page and writing to it directly involves no third party but your own mail provider.

However the Site is built at any given time, it does not:

• ask you for your name, phone number or postal address, or require an email address for anything — the contact form has one optional field for a reply address, covered in section 3, and that is the only place on the Site that offers to take one;
• ask for or process financial account numbers, Social Security numbers or credit information;
• require an account, a login or any registration to use a calculator;
• transmit, store or retain the figures you enter into a calculator;
• sell personal information, or build a profile of you from what you calculate.

That list is about what the Site asks of you. It is separate from the ordinary technical processing that happens when any page loads, covered in sections 5 and 6, and from advertising, covered in section 8.

The Site uses Vercel Web Analytics, provided by Vercel Inc. It is used to count how often each page is read and which calculators and guides are actually used, so that the tools worth maintaining can be told apart from the ones nobody opens.

It does not use cookies. It sets no cookie, and stores nothing in your browser's local storage, session storage or IndexedDB. Vercel instead counts a repeat view by deriving a hash from the incoming request, and states that this identifier is discarded automatically after 24 hours. It does not follow you to other websites, and it does not build a profile.

Vercel's documentation states that recorded data points are not tied to or associated with any individual or IP address. What may be stored with each data point is: the time, the page address and its route pattern, the referring site, filtered query parameters, approximate location no finer than city level, device type, operating system and browser with their versions, and the version of the measurement script. The full description is in Vercel's Web Analytics privacy documentation.

The measurement script, and the addresses it reports to, are served from this domain rather than from an outside host, so displaying a page does not make your browser call a separate analytics company. The data is nonetheless received and processed by Vercel as the Site's analytics provider.

Custom events. Alongside page views, the Site records a short, fixed list of actions, so it is possible to tell which tools people use rather than merely open. Each event records the name of the action and the short name of the calculator or guide it happened on — nothing else. They are: loading example numbers into a calculator; clearing them again; following a calculator's link to its written guide; following a guide's link to a calculator, and whether that link was in the text or in the card at the end; opening one of the related calculators; using one of the four export buttons, recorded as which button was pressed; and clicking the mortgage-rate banner on the home page.

Legal basis and retention. Where the UK GDPR or EU GDPR applies, the lawful basis is legitimate interests under Article 6(1)(f) — understanding which parts of an educational site are used, weighed against an impact on you that is slight, because the measurement is cookieless, carries no identifier that persists beyond 24 hours, and cannot be connected to you. Because nothing is stored on or read from your device, the separate consent requirement for storage and access under the ePrivacy rules (in the UK, regulation 6 of PECR) is not engaged, which is why the Site shows no cookie banner for measurement. The 24-hour figure above is the lifespan of the visitor identifier, not of the aggregate counts, which Vercel retains for the period applicable to the Site's plan. You can object to this processing by writing to the address in section 15, or by using any tracking protection or content blocker — the Site does not attempt to detect or defeat them.

The Site may also load components served by third parties — for example a market-data widget, and the advertising described in section 8. Where it does, your browser makes a request to that provider, and that provider can see the ordinary technical information any web request carries, including your IP address and the page you are on. Those providers act under their own privacy policies, not this one.

The Site is delivered by a third-party hosting provider. Like essentially all web hosts, that provider processes the technical information your browser sends in order to deliver a page: your IP address, the page requested, the date and time, your browser and operating system, and the referring page if there is one. This is ordinary server-log data, it is generated by the act of visiting any website, and it is handled by the hosting provider under its own terms rather than by us.

We do not use that log data to identify visitors, we do not combine it with anything else, and we do not draw on it for marketing. The hosting provider may also set strictly necessary operational cookies — for example to route requests or manage caching — which serve the delivery of the page rather than any tracking purpose.

Cookies, and the storage mechanisms that work like them, fall into three groups here, and the three behave differently enough that it is worth separating them.

• Strictly necessary. The hosting provider may set operational cookies to deliver and secure the page — routing a request, managing caching. These serve the delivery of the page rather than any tracking purpose, and in most jurisdictions they do not require consent. Section 6 covers the hosting relationship.
• Measurement — sets nothing. This is the part most often assumed to work the other way, so to be explicit: the analytics described in section 5 writes no cookie at all, and nothing to local storage, session storage or IndexedDB. There is no measurement cookie on this Site for you to accept or refuse, and no part of the consent dialog described below concerns it. It counts a repeat view from a hash of the request instead, which is discarded after 24 hours.
• Advertising — cookies, and consent-gated. The advertising described in section 8 does set cookies and read them. It runs on the written guides and on the rates page. On those pages, and only those, a consent dialog appears before personalised advertising cookies are used, and your choice is recorded and respected. Section 8 lists the cookies, who sets them and how long they last.

So whether you are asked anything at all depends on where you are. The home page, the calculators, the guide index and these legal pages carry no advertising, therefore set no advertising cookie, therefore ask you nothing — putting a consent dialog on them would be machinery for a purpose that does not exist there. Open a written guide, or the rates page, and the dialog appears, because that is where there is something to consent to.

You can change or withdraw an advertising choice at any time from the privacy link the dialog leaves on the page, and your browser's own settings can block or clear any of these cookies independently of anything here. The Site does not attempt to detect, defeat or work around a blocker.

The Site carries advertising supplied by Google AdSense, and it carries it on the written guides and on the rates page. There is no advertising on the home page, on any of the calculators, on the guide or calculator indexes, or on these legal pages. That is a deliberate limit, not an accident of layout: the calculators are the thing people come for, and the code that loads advertising is not requested at all on a page without an ad unit — so on those pages no Google advertising script runs and no advertising cookie is set.

On a guide page, your browser requests the advertisement from Google and from its ad partners. Those requests carry the ordinary technical information any web request carries, including your IP address, your device and browser, and the page you are on. Google uses this to select and measure advertising, and to detect invalid traffic.

Google is an independent controller of that data for its own purposes. It is not simply acting on instructions from this Site: Google determines how it uses the information it collects through advertising, under its own policies rather than this one. What it collects, why, and the controls you have over it are set out in Google's advertising privacy documentation, and ad personalisation can be turned off for your Google account at My Ad Center.

Cookies Google's documentation lists for advertising, with the durations it states:

• __gads — set on this Site's own domain; enables the display of advertising and measures interaction with it. Google states a lifetime of 13 months.
• IDE — set on doubleclick.net; used to show Google advertising on non-Google sites and to personalise it. Google states 13 months in the EEA, the UK and Switzerland, and 24 months elsewhere.
• test_cookie — set on doubleclick.net to check whether your browser accepts cookies at all. It is short-lived, a matter of minutes.
• DSID — used to identify a signed-in user across non-Google sites so that their Google ad-personalisation setting is respected. Google states 2 weeks.

Google may set others, and the exact set depends on your location, your Google account settings and the choice you make in the consent dialog. The list Google maintains is authoritative and is linked above; this list is the advertising subset of it as at the date on this page.

Consent. In the European Economic Area, the United Kingdom and Switzerland, Google requires publishers to use a certified consent management platform before personalised advertising may be served. This Site uses Google's own certified platform. The dialog appears on a guide page, before personalised advertising cookies are used, and records your choice. Declining does not remove the advertising — it means you are shown non-personalised or limited advertising instead, which is selected from the content of the page rather than from anything about you.

Email. There is no newsletter and no mailing list. The only address the Site ever receives is one you choose to type into the contact form, which is optional even there — section 3 sets out what happens to it. The opt-in box on that form records a preference for a list that does not exist yet. If a list is added it will be opt-in, every message will carry an unsubscribe link, and the address will not be sold or rented.

Until this section says otherwise, neither applies. If you are reading this and the Site is showing you adverts, this policy is out of date and should not be relied on — please tell us at shouldifinance@gmail.com.

The Site links to external resources — government and regulatory sources such as the IRS, and social media profiles in the footer. Following a link takes you to a site we do not control, with its own privacy practices. This policy stops at our boundary. We are not responsible for what other operators do with your information, and you should read their policies before relying on them.

We operate no database of visitors and keep no calculator history — there is no archive of your calculations to request deletion from, because the figures never reach us. Hosting logs are retained by the hosting provider for its own operational period, described in section 6, and any measurement data is retained by that provider under the terms named in section 5.

The Site is served over HTTPS. Because the figures you enter never leave your browser, the most sensitive information involved in using this Site is never in transit and never at rest on our side — which is a stronger protection than any security measure that could be applied to it once stored. No method of transmission over the internet is completely secure, and no assurance of absolute security is given.

Depending on where you live, you may have rights over personal information a business holds about you — including the right to know what is held, to obtain a copy, to correct it, to have it deleted, to opt out of its sale or sharing, and not to be discriminated against for exercising any of these.

California residents (CCPA/CPRA). We do not sell personal information for money. The Site does carry advertising on its written guides (section 8), and the delivery of personalised advertising can amount to “sharing” personal information for cross-context behavioural advertising under California law. You may opt out of that sharing: use the advertising choice offered on any guide page, or a Global Privacy Control signal sent by your browser, which is treated as a valid opt-out request. You will not be treated differently for exercising it — the calculators and the guides work identically either way. The figures you enter into a calculator are not personal information we hold, under this or any other law, because they are never transmitted to us.

UK and EU residents (UK GDPR / EU GDPR). Server-log processing by the hosting provider, and any measurement described in section 5, are carried out on the basis of legitimate interests in delivering, securing and understanding use of the Site — except where consent is required, in which case it will be asked for. We hold no account data about you, and the figures you enter into a calculator are not processed by us at all. You retain your rights of access, rectification, erasure, restriction, portability and objection, and the right to complain to your supervisory authority — in the UK, the Information Commissioner's Office.

To exercise any right, or to ask what is held about you, write to shouldifinance@gmail.com. We will respond within the period the applicable law requires. In most cases the honest answer will be that we hold nothing.

The Site is intended for adults making financial decisions. It is not directed to children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect personal information from children under 13 — indeed we do not knowingly collect personal information from anyone, of any age, as described above. If you believe a child has provided personal information to us, contact shouldifinance@gmail.com and we will take appropriate steps.

This policy may be revised as the Site changes. The date at the top of the page shows when it was last altered. Material changes — particularly the introduction of advertising or email collection — will be reflected here before they take effect, not after.

Questions about this policy, or about privacy on this Site, can be sent to shouldifinance@gmail.com.

See also the Terms of Use and the Disclaimer, which explain the limits of what this Site is and what it can be relied on for.