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.

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

• ask you for your name, email address, phone number or postal address;
• 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 4 and 5, and from advertising, covered in section 7.

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 14, 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, or in future the advertising described in section 7. 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. Strictly necessary ones may be set by the hosting provider to deliver and secure the page; these do not require consent in most jurisdictions. Measurement sets nothing at all — the analytics described in section 4 is cookieless and writes nothing to your browser's storage, so there is no measurement cookie for you to consent to and no banner asking you about one. Advertising cookies are covered in section 7 and are not in use today.

That is the position today, and it is why this page carries no consent prompt: nothing currently in use requires your consent. If that changes — advertising being the likely reason — a consent mechanism will be added before the thing requiring it goes live, and this section will be rewritten to describe exactly what is set, by whom and for how long, with the date at the top of this page updated.

The Site is expected to carry advertising in future, and may offer an email newsletter. Rather than publish terms for something not yet built — which would describe the Site inaccurately — this policy will be rewritten and re-dated before either goes live. When that happens, expect the following to be addressed:

• Advertising. Ad networks typically set their own cookies or similar identifiers and may collect IP address, device and browsing data for ad selection and measurement. The networks used would be named, their privacy policies linked, and a consent mechanism added where the law requires one. Under CCPA, some ad arrangements count as “sharing” personal information for cross-context behavioural advertising, which would require a clear opt-out.
• Email. A newsletter would collect the address you give and nothing you do not volunteer. It would be opt-in, every message would carry an unsubscribe link, and the address would 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 5, and any measurement data is retained by that provider under the terms named in section 4.

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. and we do not use it for cross-context behavioural advertising. Advertising is not in use today; if it is introduced — see section 7 — some ad arrangements count as “sharing” under California law, and this section will be rewritten with the disclosures and the opt-out mechanism that requires, before it goes live. 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 4, 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.