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Life Ledger & Compass
Three financial calculators in one place: mortgage payoff, FIRE trajectory, and freelance rates. Everything runs in your browser — nothing is stored or sent anywhere.
What each calculator does
Mortgage payoff and extra payments
Enter your home price, down payment, rate, and term, and the calculator produces a full amortization schedule. The useful part is the what-if: add an ongoing extra monthly payment, a one-time lump sum, or both, and it recalculates the whole schedule to show exactly how much interest you avoid and how many years come off the loan.
The reason extra payments are so effective early on is that a mortgage payment is mostly interest at the start. In year one of a 30-year loan, the large majority of each payment services interest rather than reducing the balance. An extra payment skips that entirely and goes straight to principal, which removes every future interest charge that principal would have generated. The yearly chart makes the crossover visible.
FIRE trajectory
FIRE stands for Financial Independence, Retire Early. The planner projects your net worth from your current age to 100, compounding your expected return and adding your annual savings until your target retirement age, then drawing your annual spend after it.
Your FIRE number is the portfolio you need before that withdrawal is sustainable — annual spend divided by your safe withdrawal rate. At a 4% rate that is 25 times your annual spending. The single biggest lever is not your return assumption, it is your savings rate, because saving more simultaneously grows the portfolio and shrinks the number you need.
Freelance rate and take-home
Converts between an annual salary and an hourly rate in either direction, using your real billable hours rather than a notional 2,080. It adds a 10% buffer when going from salary to hourly, covering costs an employer previously absorbed, and estimates federal income tax plus self-employment tax to show what actually reaches your account.
The number that surprises most new freelancers is self-employment tax: roughly 15.3% on top of income tax, because you pay both halves of Social Security and Medicare. A rate that looks generous against a salary can be worse once that lands.
A note on accuracy
The mortgage maths is exact. The tax estimate is deliberately simplified — federal brackets and the standard deduction only. It ignores state income tax, credits, itemized deductions, retirement contributions, and the qualified business income deduction. Use it to sanity-check a rate, not to plan a tax bill.
Nothing you enter leaves your browser. There is no account, no tracking of your figures, and no server round-trip; the PDF report is produced by your own browser.
FAQ
Questions about these calculators
It depends on your rate and how early you start, and the effect is larger than most people expect because every extra dollar goes straight to principal and removes all the future interest that dollar would have carried. The calculator above shows the exact figure for your loan, alongside how many years it takes off the term.
It is a rule of thumb that a retirement portfolio can sustain withdrawals of about 4% of its starting value per year, adjusted for inflation, without running out. It comes from historical US market data and is a planning heuristic, not a guarantee. The FIRE planner lets you set any withdrawal rate between 2% and 6% to see how sensitive the result is.
Divide your target salary by your genuinely billable hours, not by 2,080. Then add a buffer for the costs an employer used to cover — insurance, unpaid time off, equipment, admin. The freelance calculator uses a 10% buffer and lets you set real working weeks and hours.
The mortgage amortization is exact arithmetic. The tax estimate is deliberately simplified: it uses federal brackets and the standard deduction, plus self-employment tax, and ignores state tax, credits, deductions, and retirement contributions. Treat the tax figures as a planning estimate, not a filing number.
No. Everything runs in your browser. Nothing you type is sent to a server, saved, or logged, and the PDF report is generated locally by your own browser's print function.
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